eROI Days Email Agency

It is hard these days not to notice the amount of people on the streets, in their cars, riding buses and even enjoying a meal while navigating through a mobile device.  What does this mean for marketing? The amount of time consumers are spending on mobile devices is increasing day by day. What have marketers done to tap into the new, dynamic phase of mobile marketing and how does social media fit in?

eROI decided to find out by conducting a study of over 500 marketers to see what their current attitudes were towards mobile marketing and social media trends.

Get a brief on our study from ClickZ

Our study was geared towards learning:

• The interest in mobile marketing to marketers, if any.
• The importance of mobile marketing and social media to the marketer.
• How the marketer is integrating the media and how much research is being done to optimize it.

The study was successful and informative if not a bit surprising. If 91% of the US population uses a mobile device, what are the marketers really doing to access those consumers? Get the full study here…

Here was my presentation from the Lake Oswego Chamber of Commerce FORGE Marketing Annual Summit – great event!

As usual, I learned a ton from the other speakers:
Kimberly Barta, VP of Marketing, Dr. Martens Shoes
Dayn Wilberding, Dir of Technology, Grady Britton
Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media

Enjoy this eROI presentation!

I also included a few of my tweets below as well:
@kentjlewis nice. “remember your marketing budget is unlimited” 11:41 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Top paid placement is based on Quality Score, not just on highest price. 11:32 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

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Tripwire came to eROI in need of help with designing their Virtualization blog.  The Virtual Black Hole blog combines the different voices and personalities of 4 unique individuals, each of whom provide their own content and ideas based on their respective blog category.   As each individual varies on his or her beliefs and insight, Tripwire wanted to reflect this within the design of the site.

Initially, Tripwire had the idea of having different icons, colors and backgrounds for each one of the four authors.  They also wanted these differences to reflect the topics of each author’s blog; these including: Steve-Best Practices, Karen-Marketing, Matt-Industry, and, last but not least, Ted-Project Management.  The Tripwire team also wanted to distinguish the Virtual Black Hole blog from all others, steering away from the general post after post format of the traditional blog layout.  Lastly, they wanted to include Tripwire branding within the overall site but not be designed within the usual brand standards.

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

Kelly Samardak wrote an incredible piece in her MediaPost column “Just an Online Minute” about the wayward remaining days in the last week of August and how we all get insanely busy starting today, the first day of September AFTER Labor Day.  This is what grabbed my attention: “If you’re reading this on your iPhone, Blackberry, or crystal ball while on the beach gazing at Regis Philbin from behind in his sky-blue banana hammock, thanks, and enjoy this languid read of low-pressure, real-life socializing.  Why?  Because I know September is about to grab us all by our media necks  and wipe the floors with our souls.  See you next week; I’ll be the one in body armor.”

So, while we recognize that the final four months of the year are going to fly by getting entrenched in the online marketing / interactive agency / social media world while juggling family commitments, school, soccer practices for the kids, and an occasional date night w/ your spouse, let’s try to keep a little balance in our lives.  Until then, enjoy this article:

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In today’s New York Times Business section, there was an astute article on “The Daily Struggle to Avoid Burial by E-Mail” by Randall Stross. At eROI, we have been covered in the press on multiple occasions for Email Addiction or Email Overload, but it was the combination of today’s “burial by email” article AND a recent eMarketing speech where a friend of mine talked of maintaining 40 social media site profiles, where I felt compelled to write this blog post (slightly ironic given that a blog is a basic form of social media).

Stross mentioned in the NY Times article that both Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Mark Cuban of Mark Cuban get upwards of 2,000 emails every day and 700 messages daily in Facebook, and both of these executive process all of these emails themselves. I get about 400 emails per day and usually reply to and send 60 emails/day if I’m not booked in meetings all day.

While email is the killer app and where I spend most of my time “online,” I also occasionally blog, use LinkedIn sporadically, barely use Facebook, and Twitter when I’m distracted at a conference. Basically, this blog post is my first online admission of becoming an old man – with so many distractions, I wonder if technology company entrepreneurs and executives will evolve into communicating in truncated sentence grunts with very little deep strategic thinking, planning and writing.

I have clients asking frequently, “how will I have time to do everything I do now, AND blog AND engage in all of these conversations about my brand in every single online community?” I’ve adapted my answer to a more definitive “You can’t do it all single-handedly.” Let me get back to my 35-year old friend who has 40 profiles – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Answers, Lockergnome, digg, del.icio.us, and on and on and on. The new generation and grandpa-old 35 year olds playing the new generation’s world, attention deficit disorder is a requirement, not a condition.

So, what’s my advice in this cultural change in expectations of keeping up in the online marketing world? Experiment with all of the social networking sites and tools, and find 3 sites/tools that generate the most value to you individually and/or your company (as an entrepreneur, individual benefit/company benefit is often the same). Thankfully, there is a new protocal, OpenID, where one username/password will carry all your info with you for every online community you join, because in the future, we will all be participants in hundreds of these broad social communities or niche branded communities.

With the acceleration of online communication, it relieves anxiety just to admit that “yes, I too, feel completely overwhelmed and overloaded by using every social site and tool that comes along.” I’ve said it and those words shall set me free. Now, if I could just leave my Blackberry locked in my office desk on a weekend. Fat chance.

I’m going to try to do 4 blog entries in almost as little time as I’d Tweet 4 times. Let’s see how it goes. Alright, beginning now – here goes.

My twitter profile is www.twitter.com/ryanbuch!

Cheers,
Ryan

One trend of online marketing and the tech world as a whole is that there is an acceleration of distraction and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). And, I’m sitting next to the King of ADD, Dylan Boyd. We are listening to the first keynote at MediaPost’s OMMA show in Hollywood, but Dylan has been showing me how Twitter works and it’s quite addictive. Yes, it’s unusual (from my Twitter Virgin perspective) that respected CEO of ReturnPath just Twittered details of the birth of his child and it’s also weird to learn when some of my business associates have a bowel movement.

But, there are some newsworthy uses of Twitter, as the ADD King showed me. The Oregonian is feeding its news into Twitter, Tri-Met has its traffic updates posted real-time to Twitter.

Lessons learned from a guy who started an email marketing company – many people WANT to communicate all the time – don’t fight this human need / addiction – fuel it. Why not?

I got this email yesterday from a company called EnglishBaby! that ‘teaches’ conversational English (via the slang of professional atheletes and Hollywood stars) to an online community of nearly a million people all over the world. The email was perfect – it had one clear call to action, a great concept of a videographer following two EnglishBaby! members that met online on EnglishBaby! and got married. Better yet, it was ultra relevant as it was sent to me the day before Valentine’s Day. Crap – I almost forgot – I need to buy my wife roses and maybe a cool orchid before I get home from work today.

“To celebrate this day of love, we traveled to Istanbul for the wedding of two English, baby! members who met while learning English on the site. We hope you like the video!

Forward this message to your friends to wish them a happy Valentine’s Day!”

Check out the video – it’s awesome:
The trailer: http://www.englishbaby.com/lessons/istanbul
The main video: http://www.englishbaby.com/lessons/istanbul2

Social networking sites will turn into collaborative software platforms (think online Calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, web conference, presentation collaboration, image manipulation between many parties, and the already-standard email, chat, IM, blog, profile pages). Social networking isn’t just for kids anymore. Over 60% of new Facebook users are over 30 years old now. These 30, 40, 50, and a few 60somethings are professionals who will leverage these online communities to help with more than just business development.

If Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social community sites add professional collaboration tools like personalized calendars, spreadsheets, whiteboards into the mix, business people and businesses as a whole will standardize their entire internal communication operations (document sharing, chat, IM, blog, email threaded discussions) on these collaboration communities for increased productivity, mobility and trackability. A leader in the new frontier of Web 2.0.0.8 Collaboration Software is Portland’s own Jive Software and their blazing hot new product called Clearspace.

Traditional agencies will acquire online marketing software companies and interactive agencies. No, we (eROI) don’t want to be acquired for at least the next decade. Yes, this prediction is very real. Traditional agencies will be around for the long haul. They get the big picture. They get branding. They get traditional advertising mediums (TV, outdoor, print, etc.). They do not get interactive.

Interactive agencies get interactive because the entire culture is focused around it. Account folks talk about what they read in the daily newsletters of EmailInsider, eMarketer, MarketingVox, iMediaConnection, or MarketingSherpa. Interactive designers talk about how well certain designs will work with CSS standards, Flickr feeds, blog engines, and other limitations of the online medium that serve as amazing problems to overcome in elegant ways. Technical programmers figure out how to connect it all to a database and make sure it is strong enough to withstand huge traffic spikes if the online campaign becomes truly viral. Some of the most cutting-edge interactive work is done by smaller interactive shops or recently acquired interactive shops that have become an interactive division of a large traditional agency. In a marketing world of increasing complexity, the best quality is being produced by niche specialists (which even includes old examples of the first large-scale viral website Subservient Chicken made by a small interactive agency, the Barbarian Group).

Online marketing dollars will rapidly shift towards Custom Web Apps and Widgets. We really can’t take credit for this prediction – every panelists and keynote speaker (including top folks from NBC Universal, CondeNast, and Google) at the Sep’07 MediaPost’s OMMA East show was preaching the power of widgets. Why? Because users don’t want to leave the online communities where they socialize and interact in. Until recently, brands and media companies assume that online users will leave Facebook, MySpace, or other community and go to the advertiser’s site or media site to learn more.

That has changed. Now, brands need to make their marketing messages more interactive and more portable. YouTube popularized this with providing the code for any video for people to copy and paste onto their blog, website, Facebook or MySpace page. Doritos, NBC, HBO, and any other savvy advertiser or media company is starting to do this. For example, HBO put a widget of a disco ball countdown on its site FutureSexLove.com. When the show launched, the disco ball virtually exploded across the thousands of sites, blogs, and profile pages that downloaded the widget.

User-Generated content will be an ingredient in most business website launches (and nearly all consumer sites). In 2006, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook got all of the press. Wait, they still do. But, legions of major consumer brands launched their own primary sites or campaign micro-sites with clever concepts that drove consumers to feel a sense of ownership of the future of those brands. Notable examples include HBO’s Justin Timberlake show FutureSexLove, ABC/Disney’s 13 Nights of Halloween, and Doritos user-generated Super-Bowl ads.

In 2008, B2B companies will follow suit, but it won’t be easy. User-Generated content needs to be used in a way that accomplishes specific marketing objectives, and oftentimes B2B companies meet those objectives through Resource Centers (whitepaper, case study, and guide downloads), web forms, giveaways, or surveys. None of these online marketing tactics allow for community building, commenting, rating, “digging”, or creating profiles.

Extending this to what we do as an online marketing company that works with other businesses (not consumers), we just launched our own site, eroi.com, and there simply aren’t any social networking tools built into our primary site. We have done a tremendous amount of Web 2.0 tactics outside of our main site – four distinct blogs with built-in RSS feeds, Pageflakes, delicious, and digg capabilities, our own Facebook Group page, MySpace page, YouTube Channel, and Flickr feeds, but we haven’t pulled them all together and integrated social networking tools into our primary site. As a self-fulfilling prophecy, we could look at implementing some of these tools into our site or, even better, our products. Online support can leverage the wisdom of other customers and allow searchable discussion threads for product support issues between multiple customers. B2B technology companies can learn from Salesforce, Google and Facebook and open the API to their products to allow for anyone to build modules that easily integrate into their online products.

Not bad for a 23 year old kid who everyone chastised as insanely stupid for turning down Yahoo’s $1 Billion bid for Facebook a year ago. So, what’s the lesson for high-tech entrepreneurs? My takeaway is that you should be bold and hold-out for higher valuations as you continue to build community online and build tremendous value in your company. Of course, there is a finite window for some industry sectors, especially in technology. But, if you have confidence in the long-term viability of your business model, be patient and hold off on accepting seemingly generous offers like Zuckerman did.

Read more about this MSN article on Facebook (the first paragraph is below):
Microsoft Corp beat out Google Inc on Wednesday in a battle to invest in socializing Web site Facebook, agreeing to pay $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the Web phenomenon. Microsoft also clinched exclusive rights to sell ads on Facebook outside of the United States as part of the investment that valued Facebook at $15 billion — on par with the market capitalizations of retailer Gap Inc and hotel chain Marriott International Inc.

MarketingVox wrote about Forrester Research’s new forecast of the online marketing industry. The 3 things that made an impression on me in this forecast are:

1. I’m psyched to be part of an industry that is growing 27% a year for the next 5 years to go from $18.4 billion this year to $61.3 billion in 2012. If we can’t grow our company by at least 27% per year then we’re doing something wrong.

2. Search is strong. The big winners are search media giants Google and secondarily Yahoo, MSN, and a couple others. Email is growing, but at a slower pace.

3. Interactive agencies and media are disrupters. The report forecasts, “Interactive’s share of total ad spend is forecast to increase from 8 percent in 2007 to 18 percent in 2012.” Things move so quickly in the interactive world that we need to continually educate ourselves on the next Facebook, SpotRunner, MySpace, or disruptive community site or technology that may accelerate this trend.