Archive for category Marketing
White House Use of Twitter
This NY Times article is a good highlight of the White House policy changes in light of the recent BP oil rig disaster. An interesting note is the following.
The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, announced the proposed changes in the mineral agency Tuesday morning over Twitter.
Two points of interest.
- The White House used Twitter as the official release point. Not the press pool, not a release, nor any other channel. Twitter was the first official news channel.
- More importantly, the NY Times is nonchalant about the use of the Twitter channel as the release point. This is written as if this is no big deal and a common method for news distribution.
Overall this carries forth such major implications I am stunned that no one else is highlighting this point. Imagine, if the media did not monitor the WH Twitter feed then they would hear about the announcement second hand. Basically, the be a Washington insider this says you must be a Twitter user. It also says that the mainstream media is fully acceptant of this as a channel as this and other stories are again complexly nonchalant about news being released over Twitter before it is ever released over a wire.
Aside: And where are the traditional news wires in all of this – absent. PR Newswire and Businesswire have not integrated Twitter or other delivery other than RSS and email into their distribution models. It looks as if journalists are uninterested in Twitter feeds of releases from these services. Wire distribution now lags so far behind Twitter and other SM channels in the speed of distribution that the relevancy of these services to reach interested parties in an immediate manner is lagging.
Constant Contact Replacement Recommendation: What is Your Favorite Email Marketing Application?
Posted by Dan Katz in Marketing, Online Marketing Best Practices on February 18, 2010
I have used Constant Contact as my preferred email service for medium to small scale mailings for several years. Throughout this time, Constant Contact has served me well with is basic feature set. However, the product development has not kept pace with the changes of Internet communications and I am investigating alternative solutions.
The items Constant Contact lacks that are present in most competitive packages are:
- Multiple levels of list views and segmentation. Constant Contact provides for a simple set of email lists without any segmentation or cross list management capabilities. This is the largest issue in that this requires numerous lists instead of one list with multiple parameters in a recipient profile.
- A varying range of metrics beyond the simple sent, open, click thru and bounce rates.
- A set of comparative trend charts and other metrics for presenting performance comparatively across campaigns. No such metrics are available from Constant Contact.
- Easy removal of the vendor brand. The Constant Contact logo must be requested to be removed from each email and is discouraged.
- Automated click thru tracking of links in email. (Constant Contact requires manual coding to track links in custom HTML emails).
- Ability to create your own email templates. Constant Contact charges a fee and must create such templates themselves.
- Integrated A/B testing of email subject lines and bodies.
- Built-in preview of email layout in email clients. A simple HTML preview is all that is available in Constant Contact.
- Unified billing. Constant Contact charges come to a credit card with little if any detail.
- Cobranded interface. We do not take advantage of the Constant Contact co-branding opportunity because it is cumbersome to setup and manage this brand.
- Google Analytics integration. Constant Contact offers no integration into Google analytics or other statistical packages,
- Free archive and image hosting. Constant Contact charges for the live archive of images and emails. Other packages do not.
- Unlimited custom fields. Constant Contact has a limit of four custom fields.
- Forms integration. Constant Contact offers no form builder or any service to easily create payment gateways for items such as donations.
- Spam filter testing. Constant Contact does not offer an easy test system to check if the emails will violate spam filters.
- CMS integration is unavailable or limited. Constant Contact does not offer or manage plug-ins to common CMS. The few that are available come from third parties.
- API restricted to list management. The Constant Contact API is solely for list import and export.
- Integration with third party tools such as WuFoo for forms, payment gateways, CRM and other technologies without API involvement on the user side.
For a replacement I reviewed numerous packages and selected the following for side-by-side comparisons. (HTML | PDF)
- Constant Contact
- mailChimp
- Campaign Monitor
- Benchmark Email
- Fusemail
- Mad Mimi
- Bronto
- Vertical Response
- Stream Send
- Myemma
- Campaigner
- iContact
- sendloop
Click on the links (HTML | PDF) to see a product comparison table that includes the following vendors. Right now, I am favoring mailChimp and Campaign Monitor. Let me know what you think of these or other vendors. And Constant Contact folks, when you find this, I am by all means open to your suggestions as well.
Wikipedia: An example of democracy and human nature
Wikipedia is no doubt one of the most referenced sites. It also drives a lot of traffic to sites and is always in the top search results for it seams like everything. But there is a public misconception about Wikipedia. Sure we all know the information may not be accurate. What I am talking about is the wrongful belief that anyone can update an entry. This was once the intent. It has failed in practice because of human nature to want to own and control territory.
I have on my personal side gone in and updated points of fact. I have also attempted to enter details (again pints of fact) for clients. They are always erased within minutes by rather militant individuals who through their aggressive editing actions have taken ownership of a set of content. We have found this to be the case throughout Wikipedia.
Example, we updated the mission statement for an environmental non-profit. The old mission statement was there quoted from the Web site. We simply updated it to the current mission that had one line adjusted. This was rejected by an editor because this was “self promotion” by an organization. The old mission now remains on the site.
Slate now has an article about how only a limited few can edit pages of popular people. This is no surprise to many people who already know that editing within Wikipedia is actually tightly controlled. So, what make someone popular? Isn’t just being in Wikipedia mean that you are noted somehow above the rest of us mere mortals? I imagine that if someone who is mentioned on Wikipedia tried to correct their own birthday or something similar it would be rejected as being “self-promotion.”
Now let the fun comments telling me I do not know what I am talking about begin!
Share presentations for visibility on SlideShare
Posted by Dan Katz in Best Practice, Marketing on June 2, 2009
YouTube is certainly well known for the success it has shown with marketers. Another effective tool is SlideShare. SlideShare offers the ability to post a presentation that others can view, share and comment upon just as you would a video on YouTube. There are a number of similar services, but SlideShare appears to have a solid user base.
Easy to use and requiring nothing more than a PowerPoint deck, SlideShare is easy to test out for marketing and communications campaigns.
What makes this really easy is a nice Microsoft PowerPoint plug-in. This allows you to work with the SlideShare features and post to the site right from within PowerPoint. Get it here.
Marketers Challenge; Gefilte Fish
I am sitting here eating a nice plate of gefilte fish. And it is not even Passover yet. But hey, I find these yummy. Certainly most members of the tribe I meet do not have the same preference for this delicacy. Few if any people really say – “hey, let’s go grab some gefilte for lunch.” This is a food crying out for a good marketing effort. It could start with a social media push to enhance the popularity of gefilte fish. As one site at http://me-eats.blogspot.com/2007/04/grandmas-gefilte-fish-for-pesach.html says, there is a story to tell. Then we could build this buzz to some cool interactive. I see the Facebook application now – send a friend a “fish ball”. Or, I would love to see little chattering gefiltes dancing on a JibJab ecard. Then this could be ready for a giant advertising campaign. We could run something to demonstrate to the world just how lovely ground up fish can be. (Only the good stuff here – it is kosher after all.)
Rise oh rise the understated hero that is the gefilte!
