Shadow Social Networks

Social networks are all the rage.

However, they are far too formal to capture how people truly communicate with each other, especially if they are breaking the law. After all, we live in an informal age. While the TV show Mad Men presents us with visions of the formal past, in our current world formal attire is rapidly giving way to informal dress even in some of the last bastions of formality such as offices, the symphony, and expensive restaurants. In offices, for example, where once the tie ruled, now the open collar shirt rules and even it has to be over its shoulder, so to speak, at the pull over shirt which is sneaking up on it.

You law abiding citizens – how do you communicate?

Don’t you flip and flitter between email, text, phone, a structured social network, and in person meetings? If you don’t want your boss or spouse to know what you are up to don’t you try and cover your virtual tracks, even if you aren’t breaking the law?

Now how about non-law abiding citizens?

Chances are they are creating a Shadow Social Network. They are likely giving some structure to their unstructured communication system in hope that they don’t get caught. Law breakers and would be law breakers tend to switch from work to private email accounts, the phone or in person meetings when it is best to not leave too clear of a trail.

What so Shadow Social Networks mean for companies and law enforcement?

To really understand what employees are doing and to catch the criminals or terrorists, organizations have to be able to piece together these disparate strands of communication and see HOW the Shadow Social Network functions, WHO is involved, and WHAT is being done. Normal search and analytics won’t work. Simple email threat analysis and keyword search is not up to the task. Only sophisticated solutions for monitoring, searching, and analyzing across all types of unstructured data can hope to piece together the real picture in a timely manner.

Some marketing myth busting

In the last post, I wrote about why people get as excited by your marketing collateral as they do your home movies. In this one, I’m going to bust some commonly held marketing beliefs.

Myth 1: People are going to pour over every word in your marketing text just like you do.

Reality: You’ll be lucky if they skim it. People like to feel that they are making sound decisions so it is helpful to have a coherent story in the text – just don’t expect people to read it word for word. They will skim it and piece together an executive summary, especially if you haven’ already provided a skimable executives summary.

Tip: Make your marketing text easy to skim. If they can’t get the message in a quick glance through go back to the drawing board.

Myth 2: The facts matter and, if they aren’t convinced yet, give them more facts.

Reality: Narrative is key. People don’t remember facts and are often bored by them.

Tip: Give them a simple narrative they can remember and repeat to others.

Myth 3: Marketing is a creative function

Reality: Good marketing uses both the left brain and the right brain.

Tip: Adopt an agreed upon set of marketing metrics, set clear goals, analyze your market, test and analyze your campaign to the degree possible.

Myth 4: You know what your customer wants and why they did what they did.

Reality: You probably don’t know. The customer might not even know.

Tips:

a. Talk to customers. Conduct 1 on 1 research, surveys and analyze behavior.

b. If you have sales reps, go with them on calls or listen in on the phone to understand where customers get excited, what turns them off, what closes sales, and what inhibits the sales process.

c. Get your customers to come and talk to the sales staff and the marketing staff about whey they bought and what they think of dealing with your company pre-sale and post-sale.

d. Where possible analyze customer behavior over time, across channels and across touch points otherwise you have no chance of getting a clear picture.

Why your collateral is like your home movies

For most companies and executives, their marketing collateral is a priceless object that when bestowed on a prospective customer magically transforms said prospect into a real paying customer. Alas, people outside the company simply do not share the passion for the company’s collateral. For outsiders, with the exception of competitors who are conducting research, reading a company’s collateral is as exciting as watching someone’s home movies.

Why?

+ They don’t care if YOUR Bobby and Sally got to swim in Lake Metamucil because they have THEIR own Bobby and Sally who they actually care about. Your Bobby and Sally just do not generate the same warm and fuzzy feeling. In business, your company and products are at the center of your world. They aren’t at the center of your prospective customers’ worlds.

+ People are busy. They have a hard enough time keeping up with everything they have to deal with to put too much attention towards that they don’t have to deal with.

+ If they are non-technical executives, they probably just don’t love products all that much and words on a piece of paper are not going to get them to form an emotional attachment to yours. You love your product. It is your product. It isn’t our customers. For every iPhone that people love, there are 99 products that they use because they fit a need. If they are executives and are simply buying the product for others to use or to replace others then that emotional attachment registers even lower on the wow meter.

Reflections Part 2 - IRCE 2009’s email workshop starring Neil Kjeldsen

Online marketers are continuously bombarded with new tactics that they “should” use if they want to be state-of-the-art. Most of these wonderous new tactics sound great and some actually are highly effective. However, many mid-size e-tailers have small online marketing teams (in many cases only a few people) that do not have enough hours in the day to adopt and become proficient with the tactic du jour.

The Perricone MD Case Study

At the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition’s email marketing workshop, iPost customer Neil Kjeldsen, vp of ecommerce for Perricone MD, spoke on segmentation and gave a very actionable case study built around problem, solution and results (with actual specific numbers). Perricone MD is a prestige skincare company that was founded by Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a dermatologist, award-winning author, and anti-aging expert.

Kjeldsen helped online marketers cut through some of the clutter and find a way to efficiently reignite relationships and sales from dormant customers. When Kjeldsen joined Perricone MD, he found that the vast majority of their customers were inactive - something that Perricone MD had in common with most companies. To make matters worse, these inactive customers were far more likely to opt out and flag Perricone MD as a spammer - hurting both the company’s ability to market to them in the future and Perricone MD’s email sender reputation with ISPs.

Kjeldsen’s solution was to adopt iPost as Perricone MD’s new email service provider (ESP) and to implement the iPost Customer Engagement Program, a combination of strategic services, processes and software. Kjeldsen said that iPost first worked with Perricone MD to analyze their email, web analytics and purchase data. Perricone MD then implemented iPost’s Autotarget, which automates and updates daily Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value (RFM) segmentation.

Using Autotarget to automatically group customers into micro-segments, Perricone MD divided customers into engaged and unengaged segments. First Perricone MD started mailing safely (engaged customers tend to have very low opt out and spam complaint rates) to the engaged customers and tested a variety of methodologies to see what best improved revenue and campaign profitability.

Perricone MD next worked with iPost to develop a “trail size” promotion for the unengaged customers and began mailing to them in “safe” segments. The safe segment approach is central to iPost’s Rapid Reputation Repair process and enables e-tailers to mail to questionable lists without damaging their email sender reputation. According to Kjeldsen, in one month Perricone MD was able to implement and optimize the engagement programs. Because Autotarget automatically segments customer data daily, Kjeldsen said he and his team found that it only took them 5 minutes per mailing to use Autotarget.

Kjeldsen's presentation made a clear case for actionable analytics

Kjeldsen's presentation made a clear case for actionable analytics

Kjeldsen stated that the results from the iPost Customer Engagement Program included:

* A huge increase in conversion rates (from 0 to up to 33 percent)

* A dramatic jump in revenue per email sent from $0 to $0.26

* Growth in online revenue from unengaged customers from 0 to 7 percent

The Bandwagon

Amusingly, another ESP in the session presented a case study on the benefits of RFM that used data from another iPost case study on the Eastwood Company. To work around the fact that it was actually an iPost case study, the vendor referenced a DMNews article from October 2008. I encourage you to check the article out!

The ESP’s pundit, also, told the audience that RFM is - as a process - very easy to do, something that Kjeldsen countered when he got up to speak. Kjeldsen said that he used RFM analysis in previous jobs and loves Autotarget because it makes RFM easy and that without Autotarget RFM is simply not easy for small and mid-size teams.

The Workshop in General

I found the presentations to be far better at the workshop than the general sessions. The presenters came across far more knowledgeable but were still not consistent in highlighting quantitative results and making it clear what all is involved (time and resource) to achieve those results.

Reflections Part 1 on IRCE 2009

Email marketing is growing up and getting its due at IRCE

Last year at Internet Retailer, email marketing seemed to be treated as the bastard stepchild of the online marketing world. The event organizers kept it out of the limelight and few speakers acknowledged doing something so pedestrian and “yesterday” as email marketing. Most e-tailers I met at IRCE 2008 were either satisfied with blasting out emails or were just thinking of dipping their toes in the email marketing waters. Online marketers were somewhat intellectually interested in email analytics and segmentation but were not emotionally revved to do something about them.

What a difference a year and a recession make! Not only did email marketing more often find its way into session presentations but most online marketers I spoke with wanted to take their email marketing to the next level, even if they weren’t fully clear on what “next level” meant for them. I also far more agencies who wanted to improve email marketing for their clients and C-level execs who wanted to understand the potential of email marketing.

The sessions – sadly – were generally worse than last year and reflect poorly on Internet Retailer. Most of the presentations in 2008 did not have metrics nor did they necessarily reflect sophisticated business savvy but they at least were professional. This year most of the one I saw seemed to be thrown together. For example, on session on email marketing messaging was put on by an email service provider and an e-tailer. They promised practical advice that attendees could put into practice but everything was vague and general. Missing in action were metrics and practical processes. For example, the big takeaways from the session included have a call to action (CTA) and make your emails relevant. Ok.

I would like to see Internet Retailer take a pledge to only have speakers who

1. Share the specific results of their programs and

2. Give attendees an idea of how much time and effort is involved to achieve the stated results

In small and mid-size companies the whole online marketing team has too many things on their plate as is. They usually need help prioritizing - given their resource constraints – on what will help them best move the revenue needle. A lot of things are interesting or worthwhile but few can do them all.

Random thoughts on the MarketingSherpa Email Summit

I. General feeling that this was going to be a good year for email marketers. Based on a survey of marketers email marketing and social networks were the only two marketing programs that are expected to see a net increase this year.


II. MarketingSherpa stressed:

• Take an analytic approach

• Tie in email marketing with optimized landing pages. Big push on optimizing landing pages that included full day of training prior to the start of the show.

• Tie in email marketing with social networks.

III. Social Media:
A. A lot of talk and survey results show big plans from companies on spending more here but the results on this were mixed. One case study of (anonymous company) showed a 62% increase in reach of the email. However, the case study where an emailer (Miles Media) showed results portrayed the reach as being minimal.

• 100K emails sent

• 47 posts

• Ave of 8.4 opens and clicks (she didn’t show these on her slides so I just scribbled down the numbers from her talk but I think I got them right)

B. The big winners from the two case studies for most popular social media sites were:

• Anonymous company in descending order of posts: Twitter, LinkedIn (sign a B2B emailer???), MySpace and Facebook (a distant forth)

• Non-anonymous (Miles Media) in descending order: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Digg (distant forth)

IV. The email marketing awards were a joke. only big name companies won. (Big names = Fortune 200 and Global 1000. )

You may be asking yourself right now – why, did their vast array of resources yield superior results? Well, no. Except for a couple of winners from Capital One and a catchy email postcard from Dell, the winners…how should I put this…stunk. They were just a mass of very tiny and often unformatted text. One exec I spoke with said they looked like the type of emails he gets all the time and automatically deletes. Another exec described them as “text dumps.”

Tips on avoiding deliverability disaster

I encourage you to check out a webinar Steve Webster and I did earlier this month.

You can find out about here: http://www.ipost.com/resources/webinars_deliverability.php

Email delivery is yet another thing for you to worry about in 2009. Delivery is always a moving target. ISP practices and customers' attitudes towards your emails change. It is a privilege, after all, to market to someone.

In the webinar we cover:

• How can you determine how your email is performing?
• What's important to get email through delivery obstacles?
• What can you do to improve your email reputation?

While email marketing is very cost effective, the real cost of is losing the right to market to a customer or, at the least, having your email end up in the spam folder and not the inbox.