The relatively low cost of internet marketing versus traditional avenues may have initially brought followers in a failing economy but the steady increase in budget was directly related to the ROI gained from these non-traditional channels.

Get the whole study »

1. Social media integration – share with your network becomes a key component in every email (and email marketers can segment lists to optimize for Gmail (Google Buzz) or Facebook’s Titan)

2. Mobile – SMS and Email converging has great benefits for things like mobile couponing for retailers

3. Video Lite – animated gifs to appear as a video – see eROI’s Dylan Boyd blog post on “VIV Blows it out with Animated GIFs”

4. Email Browsing – example of Sears using Gmail’s Enhanced Email: browsing module is decided and displayed at the time of open, not the time of send, which allows the information to be as current as possible. An email sent last month pulled today’s best-sellers from Sears.com.

5. Transactions -Email certification of a known trusted sender is especially important for e-commerce clients.

6. Email Management / Sentiment – ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart wrote in a separate EmailInsider article about a “thumbs-up” button in the inbox to re-inforce positive sentiment in email instead of sledge-hammering the negative world of reporting spam as the only option.

If you dig a little deeper, there is a whole lot more innovation coming to the Future Inbox.  Social tools are available to scrape profile info (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other social media sites) and append that to your email lists to allow better personalization and segmenting.  OpenID frameworks will allow information to be passed more freely between email and any online community through a single username/password that will inherently recognize you from your inbox.  The future is near and email is innovating as fast or faster than most other industries.  Get ready.

While you may still have the title as Email Marketing Manager, you are likely expected to have some expertise and drive inbound marketing, marketing automation programs, coordinate integration with social media and potentially be the online community manager for your company, closely tie into your search engine marketing program, and all of this is on top of the strategy and implementation of your marketing plan for the year.  It’s exhausting and the pressure is on – 2010 is about action and results – and the tension between marketing and sales is going to increase with the demand for quality leads that convert into real sales.

So, let’s cut to the chase and dig into what will happen in 2010.  Here are my 11 Web + Email Marketing Predictions:

1. Email, Search, AND Social (the 3rd staple of online marketing)
In an online marketing survey study that we did with eM+C in December’09 on 2009 trends (which will be published in mid-January 2010), we asked online marketers which online marketing channels they used.  By far, email, search, and social were clearly the 3 most used channels.  Within the social media channel, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs were the areas that marketers spend the most time and energy into building.  This trend will only increase in 2010 to the point where Email Marketing and Search Marketing will be joined by Social Marketing as the 3 pillars that make up the backbone of online marketing.

2. Location, Geo-Based Apps
Mobile, mobile, mobile. Yes, mobile has reached critical mass. Marketers have noticed. At eROI, we’re being asked to launch mobile-friendly websites and for our client’s primary site, integrate feeds for location-based social media tools.  Additionally, there are several apps that take advantage of broadcasting your location to friends -  like Foursquare, BrightKite, and even a little Portland start-up named Shizzow that are basically like Geography-based Twitter.  The purpose is to get your friends or business associates to meet up through happy accidents of learning you are nearby and stumbling upon a quick informal meetup.  In our voyeuristic times, these apps take transparency and over-sharing to the next level.  And, of course, email alerts are the backbone of this channel so you know when your friends are nearby.  With smart phones automatically detecting your location, this new channel of geo-based mobile apps is incredibly intuitive and its uses will take off in 2010 (pet companies rolling out mobile apps to find nearest dog park or doggie daycare; coffee shops and retailers promoting mobile coupons when you are within 100 feet of the store; the uses are endless and our addiction to our mobile devices and their community of apps grows deeper).

3. Real-time web
Twitter started this trend (and Facebook and Friendfeed quickly caught on) and now the demand is there from consumers to constantly want to know what the collective human consciousness is around any and every topic.  People want to know what is happening NOW and what people are thinking/feeling/perceiving/eating/breathing/doing NOW.  Marketers will adapt and drive this trend even stronger in 2010 by creating ways for people to rate, review, and comment through their mobile phone or laptop on what they are thinking/feeling/perceiving/eating/breathing/doing and those apps will be searchable and able to be filtered so others can gain insight from what’s happening now.

4. Advanced collaboration, online community
To many companies, collaboration tools for internal communication or to create branded online communities for customers were expensive and time-intensive to get off the ground.  Now, Google steps in with a free tool Google Wave that isn’t perfect by any stretch, but is a great start to prove the value of collaboration and idea-sharing within companies.  As far as external communities where customers share insights, tips+tricks, examples, and resources with other customers, there will always be some extra effort put into strategy and user-design to make sure this is thought-out and customized to your brand.  There are some great open source tools like BuddyPress and other enterprise tools like Kickapps, Jive Software, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint.

5. Integration of database apps (OpenID standard)
Email Marketers have seen the advantage of smart integrations between their email marketing application and their CRM (Salesforce.com is most common), social tools (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and publishing RSS to Email), ecommerce apps, and other database apps. This is a big push for us at eROI in 2010.

From a web user perspective, open platforms like Facebook Connect and Twitter allow me to seemlessly scrape my profile info and my friends profiles and connections into new applications (cool client examples to check out are Moonit and Wacom).  In 2010, you’ll see more web applications and online communities really start using OpenID as a standard to port your profile information and have 1 single username/password across the web.  There is such information overload that users are going to demand standards like OpenID to keep it as simple as possible.

6. Email Campaigns: Doing the Unexpected
Email design best practices are great – they tell us all the components we need in a successful campaign – subject line, email pre-header, header, main body, footer, call to action, offer, concise copy with relevant messaging, landing page, lead capture, optimized auto-responders based on subscriber behavior, and the list continues.  However, following the book on everything, including a prescripted design, can make your email predictable and email recipients take notice.  eROI’s Dylan Boyd points out a few unexpected email design strategies and tactics:
Animated GIFs? You Bet.
The Test: Vertical vs. Horizontal Email

7. Analytics: Measure Everything Every Second
Marketers have always dreamed of one marketing dashboard that pulls tracking from all marketing channels (email, search, social, events, referrals, etc) and systems (CRM, marketing automation, POS, financials) into one screen – never going to happen – there is just too much to measure and specialized tools for each medium do a much better job than all-in-one dashboards.  The clear emerging leader in tracking and analyzing social media metrics is Radian6.  It will be fascinating to see how marketers will tie all their tracking data together from these many disparate applications.

8. Information Overload: Content Filters
Based on human behavior since the dawn of time, we’ve always been most influenced with our activities, our buying decisions, and our own worldview by what our friends and family suggest.  In today’s world, this is more tangible than ever – our friends become our filter for most content we consume on the web (Facebook Connect integrated into more and more web services is a perfect example of this).  News aggregators like Google News and MyYahoo will need to integrate friend content filters like Facebook Connect to stay relevant.

9. Augmented Reality
“Beam me up, Scotty.” As Kevin Arthur points out in his iMedia Connection article ‘Techie Toy or Targeted Tool’: “Augmented reality is essentially combining the real world with digitally created images. The technology gives users the ability to control their environment using sound and compelling visuals.  AR brings “tactile” imaginary element to the interactive experience.”  Augmented reality (AR) is really cool technology – it allows brands like Topps bring its physical playing cards alive in 3D interactivity with users. AR allows people to project 3D presentations from their smart phones. AR allows physical products come to life in retail stores increasing sales conversions at point of sale.  It’s the stuff of the future, which is why I think it’s going to take a couple years for people to adopt this technology.  It has a whole lot more value and user scenarios beyond the limited value of Second Life’s virtual world, and AR will be the talk of marketing conferences in 2010 (it just won’t be widely adopted until later).

10. Keep your monitor, Recycle your TV box
What’s the point of your TV box when you can watch most of your favorite TV programs, sports, and films online on Hulu, ESPN, Netflix, and others.  Simply, hook up your laptop or old computer with a wireless Internet connection to a killer flat-screen monitor and you’ve now got a Smart TV to go along with your Smart phone all the while taking advantage of the kinda-smart, real-time web where online video is becoming standard and more engaging then ever before.

11. Anti-ADD; Deep Thinking App
All of us have done some planning (business plan, marketing plan, 2010 marketing calendar) for 2010 over the past couple months, and it makes you very aware of all the distractions that we have throughout the course of the day, the hour, the minute, the second.  Our most effective planning sessions were out of the office, without laptops, in a simple room with a whiteboard and marker.  Even as I write this article, I have new emails pop-up in the bottom right-corner of my screen, tweets from Tweetdeck in the top right of my screen, and I turned my Google Chat off for a little focus.  Fortunately, I have an outline to work from that I actually wrote with pen on paper – so old-school.  For managers and executives (and everyone really), there must be an application that shuts out all other applications, emits soothing white-noise and allows us to really think so we aren’t constantly distracted and reacting.  More of us place a greater value on this “thinking time” for parts of our day as we live and thrive in this increasingly ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) world that we are perpetuating.  Thank you Deep-Thinking App of 2010 – you are my friend.

The finished product, see how it was done below.

The first thing you see when you log in is the dashboard.  To create an event you click the “create and event” button on the left hand side.

It will prompt you to put in some basic information about your event.  The event description even supports html!

Next you create tickets, registration dates and the event schedule.

After you input everything into the fields your event will look like something like this.  You will still have the options to edit or delete anything that has been created.  You can have more than one ticket set up for each event too.

Once all the info is entered for the event it is time to customize.  All the customization fields are in the “Customize” tab.

The customized ticket fields can capture important information like name and email or they can be fun, in this case “What Bling are you Bringing?”

This is where it gets really cool.  The Theme Editor let’s you truly make the event look like your own.  You can change the header, footer or entire style sheet.  You have to know some html and css but with a basic knowledge you can do great things.

And like the icing on the cake, the email receipt had to be custom too.  There is html and plain text options and you are able to change both.

All that’s left is to publish and enjoy your new event!

Registration Page

Number of tickets

Ticket information with custom fields

Payment information

The thank you page

And like I said it wouldn’t be complete without the thank you email.

Register for your own free eROI Event account »

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

Yes, it’s time once again for the infamous PAF Battle of the Bands. And if you haven’t guessed, the theme this year is the 90′s.

Ahhh, remember Jon Bon Jovi, Dee Lite, Madonna, Nirvana and the most wonderful of all, M.C. Hammer?

So put on your pantaloons or your plaid shirt (or both) and sign up your band for a chance at glory.

Sign-up Deadline is May 30th

Do you know your membership status? Join the dynamic men and women of Portland’s Creative Services
Contact the PAF office, 503.224.2623, or jamie@portlandadfed.com.

PLEASE WRITE A HAIKU COMMENT ON YOUR LOVE OF 90′S ROCK BANDS, RAP, POP MUSIC, ANY OF IT. CONTINUE THE INSPIRATION!

]]> http://eroidays.com/2009/05/07/will-eroi-take-paf-battle-of-the-bands-for-3rd-straight-year/feed/ 3 http://eroidays.com/2009/05/06/ziba-founder-sohrab-vossoughi-inspires-in-portland/ http://eroidays.com/2009/05/06/ziba-founder-sohrab-vossoughi-inspires-in-portland/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 17:28:46 +0000 Ryan Buchanan http://eroidays.com/?p=1468 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
   
   

8. For agencies – the cultural ingredient mix that is the special sauce. Cultural context of ziba often takes 18 months on average. about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

9. Designing consumer experiences – meaningful to consumer, strategic to the brand about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

10. Ziba other offices are san diego, tokyo, shanghai – I did not know they are so global about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

11. What breaks did you get? Sohrab – “you make your own luck” about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

12. 25 year anniversary for ziba this year about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

13. Sohrab started ziba because of an entrepreneur named sam bosh who gave sohrab royalties for designing a new atm machine about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

14. Sohrab, right before college graduation, fell in love with industrial design – a mix of engineering and art about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

15. At portland biz journal breakfast with sohrab @ziba – he started feeling the downturn in dec 07, but since feb 09 lots of new small projects about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

“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.

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

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.

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.

Back to me. Do I need to make the decision to go all personal or all professional? I am finding the mix a little distracting from some of the people I follow. I’m also not sure how I should feel reading the personal bits about my colleagues. (Sorry the garlic pizza didn’t go so well Meggan!) I imagine some of them don’t feel comfortable that I’m following them because I’m their supervisor. I’ve actually chosen not to follow some people for that very reason. I know I wouldn’t want my boss to have a front row seat to all of my personal goings on – and we have a pretty open work environment here at eROI too. ALSO – who are the random people that decide to follow me? So far I’ve had 3-4. How should I feel about their sudden interest in me?

Which leads me to the other twouble with Twitter that I’ve been discussing with other Twitterphiles here at eROI.  I am finding that some companies are pursuing a full blown Twitter creep out strategy. Please stop. I don’t want the fact that I’ve shared my one too many glasses of wine the night before story to suddenly open me up to be followed by some wine company because they’ve heard the news and want to share their love of the vino. Okay, I also don’t want AA unnecessarily following me because they’ve heard and now they’re concerned for my overzealous love of the divine grape. I’m okay, really!

Don’t get me wrong – Twitter is an up and coming force that companies need to reckon with. It is already gaining a serious footing as a marketing channel. The best strategies for using Twitter are surely yet to come but so far most brands are pursuing a couple of solid yet simple strategies. For instance, piggybacking broadcasts of recent posts to drive traffic. Another strategy is using Twitter to widen a campaign’s reach for topic driven outreach to achieve broader messaging and soliciting feedback. Be open to experimenting but stay true to your brand.

One great local example is the way Travel Portland uses Twitter to get info out about local happenings, hot spots, restaurants and the like. In fact they have just launched the first “Twisitor Center” for visitors to our fine city to use for help and insider information. By far though, one of the most powerful uses of Twitter to date taking  place today is Twestival an international charity event bring together Twitter communities 175+ cities around the world for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water. Find your local event!

So if you’re just getting to know Twitter, what should you/ your company do?  I’d suggest you at least secure an account(s) for your company and any brands under your umbrella. If you are already tweeting as a company or brand, step one;  don’t be creepy. Step two; review step one. Ask yourself what your audience would want to hear from you or your brand frequently. Also, are your  tweets achieving any strategic objective? Is your audience going to get anything from what you’re saying? Keep in mind Twitter could be a qualitative strategy providing a way to promote the personality of your brand and the people and the things around it rather than a call to action soap box. (I’m personally looking forward to the real Captain Crunch tweeting.) Above all keep it simple and sane and please avoid becoming a purveyor of “Twitterhea.”

In the meantime on a personal note, I’ll keep working on what the right call for me is– all personal, all professional or a saucy mix of the two. It may be like seeing how sausage is made for awhile but follow along if you dare –yes, even if I don’t know you! http://twitter.com/mpimley