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5 Sure-Fire Ways To Make Your E-mails More Relevant

To View the original post head over to Alter Imaging’s Blog

5 Sure-Fire Ways To Make Your E-mails More Relevant

1. Segmentation

By segmenting your customer list you have a much better chance of actually converting prospects into customers through your email campaigns.

Target your recipients based on different attributes, personas and behaviors. Once you have decided on these factors, construct your email message to suit each.

• Attributes – demographics and psychographics.
• Behaviors – what are their purchasing habits, how engaged are they with your company, what types of media do they consume, why do they exist on social media platforms, etc.

2. Leverage Lifecycle Management

Imagine your customers or perspective customers are on a timeline. Where are they in respect to your business goals? Are they a new or returning customer? Or perhaps they are an inactive customer that hasn’t purchased from you in quite a while.

Figure out where they land on your company’s sales lifecycle and tailor the email message to fit.

Some examples:

• Sending welcome emails
• Promoting loyalty campaigns
• Activation emails
• Retention messages and reactivation emails
• Up-sell, cross sell etc.

3. Triggered E-mails

This ties-in with lifecycle management. Having emails triggered by certain events can be very powerful. But it’s important to make them as personalized as possible with the available data you have.

These emails are driven by automated rules that you must create. These rules then set-up the emails with dynamic content based on the customers profile. They can be used for one time messages or they can trigger a campaign with a series of emails to be sent to the customer over a certain time frame.

4. Personalization

Personalization is a key component to relevancy. Just having the customers name automatically inserted into the email doesn’t cut it any more.

The email must be tailored to fit all available data you have for that person. This includes buying habits, sex, age, geographic location, and any additional information you may have captured from a preference center on your website.

Having a preference center is an extremely important piece of the personalization puzzle. With it you can determine which emails they would actually like to receive, how often they would like to receive them, and in what subjects or products are they most interested.

5. Interactivity

E-mails that facilitate customer engagement and response through links to purchase activity, social networking platforms, communication, entertainment, preference centers, and surveys are better-received than canned email blasts.

Emails from No-Reply@yourcompanyname.com are in bad taste.

Always Be Testing

Define your objectives for the email campaign and then choose which metrics are going to give you the clearest picture of what your campaign is promoting.

Test the impact of copy on subject lists, above the fold messaging, graphical layouts, usability, colors, etc. Find what works best for you.

If you are not testing and refining your campaigns, you might as well put your marketing budget into a trash can and set it on fire.

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Digital Marketing Zen Podcast #5: Google Analytics Videos & Insider Tips

In this episode Lawton and David discuss various uses for Google analytics to optimize your site and some tips and tricks to get you started with Google analytics.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (16)

Runtime 12min

Shownotes:

0:50 What is google analytics?

1:20 Goals in google analytics

1:38 Use GA to track Customer journeys through your site

2:35 Ecommerce tracking and google adwords

3:10 GA shows REAL METRICS! not shotgun marketing

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MashUps: Living in a Recombinant Culture

I found this video a long time ago but a recent conversation with a friend brought it up again. So I thought I’d share it with you.

Its a talk done by Faris Yakob over at Talent imitates, Genius Steals about A History of Recombinant Culture.

The main idea is that we live in a recombinate culture:

Recombinance is making something from other stuff, or recombining existing ideas into a new one. If you put this concept together with our culture implicitly talking about media and how we use it (and how we now MAKE it), you get a recent phenomenon commonly known as Consumer Created Content or Mash-ups.

The farther apart these two or more ideas are from each other usually make whatever the mash-up is more intriguing.

Really interesting stuff to think about. Here is the Video and Deck from his presentation:

Faris Yakob at Interesting New York from David Nottoli on Vimeo.

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‘Digital Marketing Zen’ Podcast #2 – Mobile Marketing with location ba...

Here is show #2 where we talk about emerging mobile trends

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (12)

Shownotes

0:21 Breaking news Skype for Iphone! Blackberry to get Skype supposedly in May.

1:57 Location Based Services and the mobile marketing implications.

2:23 Cab4me android app – Application on the phone that will dial a cab and direct that cab to your specific location.

3:50 Brands leveraging mobile applications as a self branded application. I.E. Smirnoff or Budweiser could brand an application like cab4me as a possible publicity stunt or just to extend the brands touchpoints.

4:55 Drop.io Number leave a message! 646-402-5686 x 31903 . Please call in and leave any comments or feedback and we might feature it on the show!

5:10 CompareEverywhere on Android. Fast moving consumer goods need to get on the barcode bandwagon.

6:27 SKU numbers as a identifier. Price matching is JUST the tip of the iceberg. Marketers are in the information game and this is just another way to easily get your idea out there.

7:20 Buy-it-later features on these items

7:45 Marketers can leverage other forms of media after the barcode scan like micro-site or video

8:25 Starbucks application . Starbucks already has a text mobile campiagn out via SMS but an application could be much more engaging. GPS based coupons.

9:40 Mobile coupon application based off services like yelp.

10:50 Using Monitter.com twitter service for local twitter searches. Lawton is using for the worsttofirst.org movement.

12:00 Using monitter.com for local customer service to snatch up competitors customers.

13:09 Tatango.com – New Free mass text messages. Local businesses could be using this technology for building up customer lists to send special offers to best customers.

14:27 Political campaigns that use mobile and use it right usually come out on top. Look at Obama’s list.

15:10 mobile phones as the third screen (TV and Computer being the 1^st and 2^nd)

15:55 Obama’s mobile campaign was the most sucessful in history.

16:20 Using mobile lists for events

16:44 Tatango is web based and can be used through texting to a short code

17:30 fake ending!

17:50 Worsttofirst.org Press Conference

18:24 QR codes – step above CSC (common short codes aka 76453)

19:00 Qr codes hold over 300 times the information of a normal barcode

19:30 Automatic QR code programs launch people into your minisite or video or whereEVER!

20:11 QR codes in text

20:24 QR codes sent out as unique coupons or event entry devices

20:52 QR is big in Asia. Hasn’t made it big in the US due to mobile carriers stifling application development to squeeze every cent out of their customers.

Thanks for listening! Please let us hear your feedback! Post a comment or call our comment line at 646-402-5686 x 31903

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‘Digital Marketing Zen’ Podcast #1 – Twitter Power User Guide

Over the recent weeks, Lawton Chiles of chilesadvertising.com and I decided it was time to take the next step in the social media space.

We decided it was time to give back to the community and share some of the insights we have stumbled across in this vast, ever growing interactive space.

I am very pleased to announce that our first show is finally here:

 

 Marketing Over Mailbox: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Shownotes (runtime 21:24):

0:25 Naming the show?

1:16 Twitter learning curve for newbies – Basic overview of how to use twitter

2:30 Twitter is not just another facebook status! Its

2:50 This show was inspired by: Marketing Over Coffee

3:00 Show name still T.B.D!    Any Suggestions from the audience?

3:15  Talking about Christopher S. Penn’s Twitter power user guide. Find Chris on twitter @cspenn

• Power branding
• Power listening – w/ Tweetdeck or search.twitter.com or Setting up RSS feeds of key search terms
• Power networking
• Power promoting

6:00 Ensure that your twitter profile is filled out with what it is that you do! Leverage tweetback.com to use the custom background of your profile.

7:40 Sign up for everything that you can with a throwaway email address to reserve your personal/brands spot.

8:20 Use friendfeed on your blog sidebar to let people connect with you in the spaces you are in

10:00 Use search.twitter.com to find who you want to listen to. Best way to find authorities on any given subject.

12:30 twellow.com – Twitter yellow pages!

13:00 Power promoting through legitimate connections by adding value to them and in turn they will help you out.

14:30 Fundamental rule of social networking

14:50 How does chris brogan follow so many people?!?!

15:35 Show name changed to marketing by the motorway!

19:00 23 10 twitter users that every marketing professional should follow by Mitch Joel over at the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast

20:00 Links you should know about

• Tweetdeck.com – Adobe air application that will help you better manage information
• Twellow.com – Twitter yellow pages
• Ping.fm – Aggregate all status updates with one click!
• AidRSS.com – measures audience engagement and provides integrated tools to enable you to customize your RSS subscriptions. Save time, boost productivity, and Read What Matters.

21:00 Thats all for the unnamed show renamed “the show”

Thanks for listening! Please let us hear your feedback! Post a comment or call our comment line at 646-402-5686 x 31903

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OgilvyOne Tenth Week

WEEK 10:

DATE: 7/14/08 – 7/18/08

This Week I did the usual Adwords stuff and the City and Guilds Rebranding is back on. This is a good thing because now I will get to see the process all the way through at least the pitching part of it.

Monday – There was an interesting presentation put on as part of the digital edge training program that I am going through. The module was entitled “Reaching consumers through entertainment”. It highlighted the various ways you can reach consumers in a very non intrusive way.

Advertising in the past has been about interrupting the consumer in their environment. This method of pushing no longer works. Now the landscape is increasingly changing towards a new way in which the consumer now opts in and goes out to gets this content for themselves. People log on to the internet and click on where they want to go. People Tivo their favorite shows now and watch them at their leisure. The idea now is about capturing their attention in the short amount of time you have with them. This can be done by adding in entertainment/engaging content to suck them in.

The module showed some pretty interesting ways in which you can seed in advertising into the media people consume. It could be in video games, movies product placement, interactive websites/microsites with games, the list goes on and on.

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OgilvyOne Eighth Week

WEEK 8:

DATE: 30/6/08-4/07/08

Monday – I trained with the ad words learning center and with some of the NeoOgilvy team. I learned about how there are different campaign levels and also how keyword selection also broken down into ad groups.

There are also ways of adding negative keywords to your campaign and adgroups. When you add a negative campaign you are limiting the amount of people who are going to see your add. This may sound like a stupid thing to do! But it is a very clever way of attracting only those who are more likely to buy your product. If you have very broad keywords set up you are likely to get a load of traffic to your site only to have them leave when they realize this isn’t what they were looking for. A good example of this would be for a wedding singer/music band. This band may want to eliminate such key words as diamond or gold (as they might appear in a search query as gold wedding band etc.) Appearing to these people is not relevant to their search query and depending on how you have your campaign set up, this could cost you money.

If you have a pay per click campaign set up then the person would be highly unlikely to click through on your add. However this is not always the case and they might click through and are less like to convert than someone searching specifically for a band. You may have your campaign set up so you pay for the number of impressions your ad gets. This simply means how many times your ads are served their loaded browser. With the wrong keywords you could easily eat up your budget on a highly trafficked broad keyword that is not specifically relevant to your business. This method is also referred to as CPM campaigns with CPM standing for cost per thousand impressions. Another way Google will do ad words campaign is on a conversion basis. This method is where you only have to pay for your ads if the person clicks through and actually purchases something from your site. Google then receives a percentage of the revenue your business gains.

Tuesday – I worked on more ad words stuff for Abbott diabetes care. I refined the list of keywords and keep splitting them up into smaller and smaller ad groups.

With a £13k budget Sophie told me that I will probably just have 3 separate campaigns with about 20 ad groups and within each ad group there are about 10-15 different keywords to be purchased. When you set up campaigns this way it is much easier to see which ad groups and specific keywords are performing well and with ones to cut from the budget.

I think this is the cool thing about Google adwords because you can optimize your campaigns on the fly and make sure you are getting the best bang for your buck. Also with the platform it is backed with tons of analytics to show the client specific ROIs on any given campaign, ad group, or keyword. This is something that is becoming increasingly common in today digital landscape.

Wednesday – I was working with the BT email team again back at my old desk. We have been given a brief on finding the reasons why BT Tradespaces emails are not being as effective as possible. The deliverability audit is going to be pitched to the Tradespace team in the coming week.

My job on the project is to go through the BT Tradespace site and record the different user journeys that a user could experience. I also collected as many emails as I could squeeze out of the site so we could later score them against emailing best practice.

I also was given access to a new program… This is something you will want to look into if you already haven’t. The program is called SnagIt. It is a program that can be used to capture quick screenshots with the touch of a button. Now the cool thing about this program is that once you have captured the item, the SnagIt editor automatically brings it up and you can fully edit it there with a wide variety of tools. Once you have edited/cropped/added shapes/text…etc , there is a easy to use output button. With one click of the output button you can send it directly into a Microsoft office document (or any program of your choosing), without having to save it and then go into powerpoint and insert an image and find the image…. You get the point. This program blew my mind and it makes working and creating documents much more efficient and looks much more professional than ever before. The program costs 50$ but is totally worth it if you regularly make presentations.  Ok enough of my commercial for SnagIt… it is so cool though.

Thursday – Half of the day I worked on the Abbott PPC campaign and the other half I was doing the email deliverability audit.

For the Audit I was given best practice scorecard to rate the individual emails. Some of the emails were just utter crap and I can’t believe they are sending such things. It is important (and best practice) for the Email sender name to match that of the subject line. Otherwise the person could easily overlook it and say who is (for example) ‘Admin’? In this day and age of email overload there is no room for error when sending out emails. From the two email marketing conferences I have attended, I heard multiple times that about 26% of email users use the spam button as a means of unsubscribing from lists. This is a huge concern for this specific audit.

Another red flag I noticed was that none of their automated emails had any unsubscribe mechanism. Hmmm this would lead me to hit the spam button if I was any normal consumer. When registering for their site there is also no preference center to specify what time of emails you would like to receive about the product and also how often you would like to receive their emails. This is important to give the consumer a more personalized relevant experience with your brand. There is also a law in the UK (not sure if it is in America) that requires all businesses to supply their registered business number and their address at the bottom of emails. This is also not in any of their emails. This is less of a deliverability issue as it is a legal one!

Friday – We went over the deck that we are to present for the deliverablity audit on Tuesday and refined it a little bit. We went through:

The audit outline (courtesy of Tom Duckham) includes looking at:

• All outbound emails (including those sent on registration).

• Data processes (list hygiene, complaints and unsubscribe practices)

• Technical set up (as it relates to email deliverability and authentication)

• Cross platform analysis (are the emails all cross platform compatible?).

The audit will cover the 10 best practice steps.

• Set and Manage Expectations

• Confirmation Email

• From and Subject Line Branding

• Ensure Relevancy

• Ensure Readability

• Easy Unsubscribe

• Ensure Data is Fresh

• Monitor and Track All Complaints

• Dedicated IP, Sub-domain, and Authentication

• Seed Major ISPs

For each of the 10 areas we would provide

• Assessment of the current situation.

• How the current set up compares to best practice.

• Recommendation of what should be done.

• An estimate for what we’d need to do to implement or supervise implementation of the recommendations.

Because each of the 10 sections had four different parts to it this all took a couple of hours. We ran through it piece by piece, where we each put in our two cents about what should be done.

If applicable to your workplace, have you had the opportunity to visit or learn about other departments/areas in your company/organization? Did you have the chance to work in some capacity in that area? If so, what did you do and what did you learn as a result?

I am now working with the Email Marketing team of BT and also with the NeoOgilvy media buying/planning team. I have also had numerous interviews with the different heads of the different departments

Back to Week 7

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Using WiseStamp to build your personal brand in every email

I recently came across a new firefox plug-in called WiseStamp. It is a tool that automatically inserts an html signature into your Gmail (also supports AOL mail, Yahoo! mail and Hotmail) while composing an email.

What does it look like?

Why should you use it?

Well for starters, the internet such a vast place with so many destinations that being easily findable is KEY.

Every email that you send serves its original purpose of communicating a message AND provides a myriad of ways for people to easily connect with you at their convenience (via the hyperlinked contact buttons, much like the addtoany share buttons on most sites)

I am a strong believer in usability/accessibility. This gives your signature a personality and acts as a portal to all things that are you. By providing these hyperlinks you are doing the legwork so that other people don’t have to. 

With the set up being completely intuitive and only taking about 3minutes, I don’t understand why everyone would take the time to further promote their online spaces/brand.

 

Non-Profit Use

I would Highly recommend using this plug-in for non-profit organization that have little or no budget for their email marketing. It will most certainly take that barrier of people having to find you online (where ever that may be), while making your emails appear more professional looking.

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OgilvyOne Seventh Week

WEEK 7:

DATE: 06/23/08-06/27/08

Monday – on Monday I did a lot of research and reading on writing creative briefs. The creative briefing process has a ton of steps to it, meaning that ideas don’t just fall out of the sky!

The process was broken up into pre-meeting preparation, spring boarding, excursions, idea selection and honing, and planning for action. I think the excursions bit was the most interesting because the environment for brainstorming is very important to spurring new ideas.

Tuesday- I was working on the BT email audit and did some research of my own on field marketing.

Wednesday – Wednesday I sat in on a strategic meeting for yet another reengagement piece for BT’s credit card emails. They have been dropping in open rates and we were trying to come up with ways to get people clicking through again. The main issue was that BT is a telecoms company and offering credit cards is probably causing a disassociation in the mind of the consumers. We decided to do some subject line testing and also throw in some heatmapping into the mix.

Heatmapping is a way to test how effective the creative is on the customer. A camera is affixed to the top of a computer screen that tracks the eye movements of the person browsing the webpage or email. Once it has tracked the eye movements the areas where the person was looking at the most/longest it shows this data in a heatmap on top of the creative itself. This can be a very valuable technique in optimizing webpages/emails in the day in age where the consumer’s attention can be lost so easily because of everything else out there.

I also learned a few things about affinity marketing programs. An affinity marketing program is when you develop programs which leverage other parties to help promote or build your business in exchange for value of some form.

I also research the different customer loyalty programs that there are out there:

• Rewards programs - where the offering to the customer is to a totally unrelated product to that of your own. The Rewards program is a useful acquisition tool because of the differentiated product offering that other competitors might not be offering. The prospect is pulled in by this differentiator and hopefully views it as a better deal or value-added.
• Rebate programs - where the offering is an increasing rebate or price drop for the more amount of money that they spend with you.
• Appreciation programs -  much like rewards programs but the offering is brand related.  They are used to increase the lifetime value of customers by influencing purchases of your brand.

Thursday – I have been given a project of my own from NeoOgilvy, the media buying/planning arm of OgilvyOne. One of Ogilvy’s clients, Abbott diabetes care, has expressed interest in doing some PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on the google adwords platform.  The project is budgeted at £13,000! Abbott is a major provider of blood glucose monitoring systems. This is a huge deal for me and am pleased that I have been given such an opportunity.

The rest of the day I was researching  adwords  and how to use it in the most efficient manner. I also researched the strategy behind using it effectively to reach the right target audience.

Friday- I met a lot of the Neo team and worked on getting a keyword list ready for the Abbott campaign.

There was also a great presentation around 1pm that was put on at the Verge conference this year in New York. The presentation was put on again here for us and was entitled Dada, Data, Alpha, Beta w/ Jan Leth.  The presentation was broken up into four parts : Dada, Data, Alpha, Beta. (Duh!)

Dada

The first being about dada, which is referring to the art movement of dada, where the artists of that era threw out the old conventions and came up with a new way of looking at things. Dada, as relating to marketing, is referring to the increasing presence of user created media/content. Numerous mash-ups and collaborative media is being created every day by people of all walks of life. This is certainly throwing out the old conventions of how in the old days media was created and distributed via traditional channels with little end user input. Jan shared a couple of examples of how to use this ‘Dada’ mentality and incorporate it into your campaigns to increase consumer engagement and interaction with your brand. A great example was with burger king paring up with the new Simpsons movie and creating a website where you could upload a picture of yourself and click a button and the picture would be ‘Simpsonized’ and you would appear to look like Simpsons character. An even better example of this idea would be how Volkswagen took the launching of their 2008 Passat. New cars always have a huge list of new and improved features. A long text list of all these features is well and good but that is not a way that Volkswagen wanted to approach this new launch. Instead, they took these 120 new features and hired a filmmaker to create a short creative film for each and every feature. This is a new and innovative way of looking at things in my opinion!

Data

Data is becoming an increasingly important factor in any area of marketing. And better yet it is becoming increasingly easier to collect in this digital age. On the flip side however because data is so easy to collect marketers can be in a position where there is an informational overload. This is why it is important to know which data to leverage and which data is irrelevant and should be ignored. This can be easily done with the right amount of insight into what your companies primary goals are (i.e. acquisition, retention etc.)

In a world going digital, the media channels are becoming more and more addressable and accountable. Guesstimating messy figures of how effective ad campaigns are performing is becoming a thing of the past (With the exception of traditional mediums, which is becoming slightly better as time goes by.) The digital landscape gives every campaign the ability to look at results for campaigns in real time. This is allowing the marketer to become much more agile in their strategic planning and can change things on the fly if they are not performing to expectations.

Alpha

The alpha section was talking all about WOM (word of mouth) marketing and brand evangelists. The basic idea behind this goes back to the idea that 20% of your consumers provide you with the majority of your sales (80%). So why not reach out to these people and engage them even more then they already are? These are the people who are going out there and spreading the word about your brand. And you better hope that the message they are spreading are is a good one.

These brand evangelists are being engaged in numerous ways online in digital communities and the like. Bit Beer implemented a campaign where if the user took a picture of the bar code on the beer with a webcam then the program that reads the barcode would download a song for that user. This is giving the consumer a reason to actually go to there website on their own accord and engage with the brand. Chances are that they will then go and tell their friends about this super cool new website done by Bit Beer. Another example is Johnny Walker Black. They developed a mobile application for people to download that gave live webcam feeds into the different clubs around Tokyo ( I believe), so that the club goer could see if the club was hoppin’ that night. They also programmed in a taxi button where it calls a taxi for you and also a GPS mapping system for where the different clubs are located. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. Not only is this pretty cool stuff but now a whiskey company now has more functionality then simply providing their customers with whiskey. The more useful the brand can be to the person the more likely they are to talk about it. Look at Google for example, with their wide variety of free tools their brand name is now used as a verb (Just Google it.)

Beta

Beta is simply acknowledging the fact that everything that marketers and advertisers are doing should be in a perpetual beta phase. Once this mentality of constantly updating and reworking tactics is implemented the realization of ‘everything has room for improvement’ can be made and truly fantastic marketing can occur!

Here is the Slide deck from the Presentation (I highly recommend you check it out):

Are there other skills/knowledge that you’d still like to be able to acquire/learn before the end of your internship?

SEO work and some more planning strategies.

Back to Week Six

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OgilvyOne Sixth Week

WEEK 6: Interning @ Ogilvy

DATE: 16/06/08-20/06/08

Monday- Was a case of the Mondays.

Tuesday – On Tuesday I attended another conference with Skip and Joe. This was another email marketing conference ironically entitled Inbox-Outbox. Skip was a presenter at one of the workshops. There was a myriad of workshop choices every half hour and it was difficult to choose which sessions to go to.

The first session I went to was put on by Jupiter Research. They are a leading research firm in the interactive and email marketing arena. The speaker was talking about the trends that are happening in email marketing. The main take away from this part of his presentation, as to not bore you with the stats, is that people receive far too many emails each day and are more and more likely to label things as spam. The way to get through this growing trend is to make the content of the email more personally relevant to the user.

The next session I went to was pretty horrible. It was put on by a rep from blackberry. This was basically a 30 minute pitch on why companies should invest in the blackberry platform. Whilst it is a cool phone, I still would rather have an Iphone. (update: I now own a blackberry storm and still want an Iphone)

The next presentation was really cool. It was all about measurable integrated marketing. Basically the guy was talking about how there is a disconnect in a lot of companies between the marketing department and sales teams. This is a huge problem. They should exist in a symbiotic relationship where marketers go after the people with a lower lead score and keep them warm, while the sales people go after the short term well qualified leads. This can dramatically increase your sales and not waste any effort of people who were probably not going to buy from you in the first place.

This process can be done by collaboratively reviewing objectives, defining your targets, and then deciding through which channel to reach these targets. The next step is generating your creative so that is as tailored as possible to that target audience. Then agree on a time frame in which you want the program to run and then launch.

Now the interesting bit about all of this is that in the digital age we are in, this process is much easier. We have the technology to track every movement of a prospective customer on our websites. Using their IP address and any opt-in information they give about themselves, we can see what products they are looking at, how long they stay on the page, and when and where they bail out to. Now with all this data (a.k.a digital footprints) you can give a highly accurate lead score on an individual basis and tailor even more content to the individual. This can also be used to integrate the marketing and sales departments to push and pull methods online and offline. Where once a qualified lead is found the sales people could (w/ permission) call that person or the marketer could send them a whitepaper or something. Groundbreaking stuff and exciting stuff!

The next presentation was put on by Forrester Research. They specialize in mapping out new and upcoming technological trends. The up and coming new trends include things like local search, where smaller search engines are being put in place to search only niche areas unlike Google’s indexing of the entire internet. Other upcoming trends include social shopping, tagging, ranking, widgets, mash-ups, and microblogging.

All of these are included in what Forrester calls the ‘Groundswell.’ Groundswell is a social trend in which people use technology to get things they need from each other rather than corporations.

There was an interesting slide shown of the people involved in this movement. It was broken down into six groups down a social technographics ladder. The six groups were creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives. Creators are those people out there who are publishing online content such as a blog or podcast. Critics are those people out there who are contributing to what the creators have already produced. The collectors group are those who are heavily involved in using RSS feeds to get their content. These are also the people out there who vote on polls and add tags and collect useful information to share with friends. The Joiners are those who maintain social profiles on sites like Facebook. And lastly the spectators are, well, spectators and the inactive people are not involved in the social media revolution. Seen Here:

Thursday – We went to a meeting at BT is was kind of boring but necessary because they have been seeing a decrease in CTR(click through rates) on their emails. We met with one of the guys from Bt to discuss this problem and how to resolve it.

One of the reasons we think the CTR is down is because their internal email system was blocking all of the BT emails we have been sending out labeling it as spam. How ironic.

Friday – I attended my first webinar! It was pretty cool. People just call in to a number and everyone is on a conference call. The speaker was touching on how to optimize enterprise email marketing. It was about 45minutes long of the speaker talking and then it was opened up for questions via a text chat box. It was interesting to me that there were about 250 people from all over the world watching the webinar.

I think it is fascinating that webinars have come in to being such a big player in b2b sales in recent years. The decentralization of how they can educate potential customers is groundbreaking and really shows to the viewer that this company knows their stuff.

One fun fact about emails I learned is that once an email account as been dormant for 6 months it becomes a ‘honey pot’ that collects data on people who are still sending it email and raises the senders spam score. So it important to keep a hygienic list and scrub off the inactive recipients.

More on the way!

Back to Week 5

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Launchy to the rescue

Application Launcher to improve workflow

One of my favorite things I have ever found in personal productivity software is hands down a program called Launchy. It is a keystroke launcher application that can launch websites, programs, open folders, and even add an event to your google calendar.

How does it work?

Glad you asked. Well launchy is ridiculously easy to use. Once you download it, simply install and then launch it with ALT+Space. The launchy box will pop up and you type in what you are looking for. Launchy is a smart program and learns your shortcuts the more you use them.

For example: Alt+space f opens up the facebook homepage in firefox much quicker than manually opening your browser and opening up the bookmark or typing it in the nav bar.

For Example: Alt+Space my d , quickly launches my documents. Instead of having to mouse through the start up menu.

My Favorite Launchy Plugin

There are many different plugins you can get to make launchy even more useful! My personal favorite is the yubby plugin. The yubby plugin allows you to search numerous sites without having to go to them or clicking on the mini search nav bar on the top right corner of your browser.

For example: if I want to do a google image search without having to navigate to google and then click on image search, I can simply Alt+space (to pop-up launchy) and then another “Space gim kangaroos Enter” and launchy will open up a tab in Firefox with my search query displayed.

And this happens :

You can download the yubby plugin here. All of the Yubby shortcuts are listed here.

My Favorites include:

• (Space) gim (search query) for google image search
• (Space) ebay (search query) for ebay item search
• (Space) g (search query) for google search
• (Space) wp (search query) for wikipedia search
• (Space) imdb (search query) for a internet movie database search

Why this program is important

This may seem like just another program that will actually decrease productivity (probably because the examples given about seem like time wasting websites) but think about how much time it take to navigate to different folders and websites. I would guestimate that at least 10 seconds are wasted each time we are searching for that god forsaken lost folder. Now multiply that 10seconds by 20 times a day when finding a file or navigating through a website you don’t have to.

Thats 200seconds a day. Well, hey doesn’t sound too bad. Unless you add up at 3.3minutes a day of wasted time and muliply it 5days a week and 44weeks a year and you are looking at 12hours of work time wasted on navigating and not actually doing what you want as an end result.

You could use a nice hour break every once and a while! So give launchy a try. I think that every company should employ this or something similar to just plain make peoples lives easier and more productive.

Additional Resources:

Screenshot tour: Tweaking Launchy

Launchy Plugins

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Posted by dwells | View Comments

Aggregate all of your social media status updates with Ping.fm

When I first started my journey into the social media realm. I stumbled across things like twitter, plaxo, friendfeed, linkedin…. (The list goes on.)

I thought to myself that these were pretty interesting applications,
But I don’t have the time in my busy day to day life to manage 25+ different social media profile updates.

I recently started using a using Ping.FM, a new social media aggregation service. It brings all of your status updates into one box to click and post.

It has given me a chance to try out more of these social media outlets while saving me considerable amounts of time.

You have the ability to set different posting profiles as well right from your igoogle desktop. You can setup Ping.fm to post to just your blog/s or just to your facebook like profiles like myspace and bebo.

• Here is what it looks like on my google homepage as a new widget.

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