Crumbs from the Scone
Gaming is no longer the sole domain of geeky guys with programmer’s pallor: 44% of online gamers, and 40% of gamers in general, are women. Over half are between 18 and 49, and “extreme gamers” devote 45 hours a week to games. Salivating yet? Good, because here’s a pretty meaty bone: in-game advertising has reached a point where ads can improve the gaming experience. Two case-in-points:
If you ever played The Sims, then you know it’s the perfect landscape for outdoor marketers: it’s all about inventing a place where Sims can interact, and their experiences are more real when their theatre marquees, for example, actually feature current films. Electronic Arts (EA) is currently seeking sponsors for The Sims 3, which comes out in February ’09. It wouldn’t be hard to slip a catchy virtual billboard into an in-game park or highway.
Virtual outdoor ads aren’t the only way to get into the game. Amazon and Rockstar Games partnered to shill popular MP3s in Grand Theft Auto IV. Today the average Grand Theft gamer can sit back in his “stolen” car, turn up the radio, and use an in-game mobile phone to buy songs he likes—totally on impulse.
Are gamers receptive? Overwhelmingly, yes: 82% of them respond positively to contextual in-game ads. Surveys also say gamers are more influential consumers than their less playful peers.
Ready to leap? Call EA. And keep an eye out! Google’s preparing an “AdSense for Games” product that’ll make it easy to plug ads in from an online interface—which is bound to flood this market.
The Point: Get in the game! Transcending old-school boundaries of gender and age group, gamers have two things in common: cash to burn, and clout with peers. Strike while the iron is hot!
Cheers, Skip
Source: MarketingProfs newsletter 11/13/08
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In a recent Marketing Interactions blog, Ardath Albee asks: “[W]hat happens when the frequency and recency of a lead’s engagement stalls?” Often, B2B marketers will roll these leads into a “general” touch campaign, she reports, “with the intent of keeping [their] company in the lead’s mind so that when something changes, they can re-engage.” But is that the best first response when a good prospect turns quiet? Albee doesn’t think so. Non-responders fall into two distinct groups, she says, and each requires a different outreach:
If the lead is a Sporadic Responder, answering some touches, but not others, Albee suggests taking these actions:
Look at the content they are still responding to, then ask yourself, “What similarities exist between the lead’s content choices?”
Given those answers, determine if you “can you create a 1-to-1 interaction that enables you to learn more.”
If the lead is a Non-Responder, she suggests contacting them and asking specific questions, such as:
Has your position in the company changed? To ___?
Was [this] project put on hold?
Did you already solve this problem? How?
Did our content cease being of value to you? Why?
The Point: When leads turn quiet, it’s time to talk. “If you’re seeing a growing percentage of people retreating from your communications, perhaps something has shifted in your marketplace that you’ve missed,” Albee concludes.
Cheers, Skip
Source: Marketing Interactions.
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You’ve got a great new product for the high-school crowd. The demographics you’ve researched are screaming that teens love all things digital. So, your marketing team has crafted a great email campaign, with social-media components and links to a fun landing page at your site. Will this totally rad approach grab your biggest ROI ever? Not quite.
A new whitepaper from ExactTarget has a surprise for marketers seeking to reach teens ages 15-17. The results of its recent research project, conducted with Ball State University’s Center for Media Design, show that teens actually prefer to get their marketing messages via—(drum roll, please)—direct mail. Yes, good ol’ direct mail. Some findings:
A full 58% of teens surveyed report they “have been influenced by direct mail to make a purchase.”
Email came in second, with a solid 42% of teens saying an email-marketing campaign had influenced them to buy something.
But “only 13% of teens have made a purchase influenced by text marketing,” the whitepaper notes.
That last point is interesting because, when asked their preference for general communications, teens gave text messaging a high score. That love, however, doesn’t translate to marketing messages. “In terms of absolute preferences, [teens] are similar to other consumers in that they prefer traditional direct marketing channels … for marketing communications,” ExactTarget concludes.
The Point: Put pen to paper. Try adding a direct-mail component to your next outreach to teens. You may see a boost in ROI.
Cheers, Skip
Source: ExactTarget.
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Everybody loves referrals. They’re easier to close than non-referrals, make quicker buying decisions and tend to be more loyal—in short, they can often become your most profitable customers. Trouble is, referrals are also elusive. Even a likable person with plenty of integrity and knowledge won’t see an influx of referrals if her or she doesn’t implement the appropriate strategy.
“It’s worth taking the time to understand why most referral efforts don’t work,” reports Michael Beck in a recent article over at MarketingProfs, “and to understand what keys need to be in place in order to get the results you want.”
Here’s an overview of his four-step plan for referral success:
Work with enough sources. You need around 12 “core” centers of influence (COI)—people you take to lunch on a regular basis. Bolster this network by cultivating relationships with 100 “potential” COIs.
Implement a system. Relationship-building takes a good measure of conscious effort. “It is only by regular contact that you will create a stream of referral,” says Beck.
Set yourself apart. Find and cultivate a niche that differentiates you from the competition.
Invest in the relationship. “This is the key that almost everyone misses,” he notes. “To create a reliable stream of referrals, you need to make ‘deposits’ into the relationship (emotional) bank account of each of your referral sources.” Get to know your COIs, and find ways to enhance their end of the relationship.
The Point: “If you take the time to get each step right,” says Beck, “you will become one of the few professionals who grow their business strictly by referrals.”
Cheers, Skip
Source: MarketingProfs.
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“I subscribe to a wonderful Web-based entity that sends me a weekly newsletter, which I enjoy very much,” begins an entry in the Editorial Emergency newsletter. “But a while back they started sending me a daily e-mail on top of my weekly e-mail.”
The first problem with this scenario is—of course—that the company never requested permission to send the daily missive; the second is that Editorial Emergency could find no obvious way to unsubscribe from the unwelcome daily missive without also cancelling the beloved weekly issue. Making matters worse, they were still waiting for follow-up long after the 48-hour window promised by an autoreply from the site’s webmaster.
“Naturally,” continues the entry, “I’ve begun to associate my annoyance at these daily e-mails with the organization that sends them, which I imagine is not its marketing strategy. I’m on the verge of canceling my subscription altogether.”
So annoyed has Editorial Emergency become, it used this topic as an opportunity to ask its own readers how often they’d like to receive newsletters, and plans to publish the results in its next issue.
We spend a lot of time discussing the theoretical advantages of permission-based marketing; in this real-life example, we can see a customer relationship being destroyed in slow motion, and for no good reason. They’re lucky Editorial Emergency hasn’t hit the spam button.
The Point: Don’t second-guess your subscribers. Announce any changes you plan to make, and allow them to choose to opt in—or not.
Cheers, Skip
Source: Editorial Emergency.
Crumbs from the Scone
In a post at Emergence Marketing, Francois Gossieaux tells the story of making reservations with Air France for a trip to Belgium, where his father—who had been diagnosed with a pair of aneurisms—was scheduled for a complex surgery.
Gossieaux didn’t notice a glitch in the itinerary until calling ahead to give his parents the dates of his arrival and departure. “I wanted to come back on the 27th,” he writes, “and for some reason when I ordered through airfrance.com they booked me on a train from Brussels to Paris on the 27th and a flight on the 28th.”
It seemed to him like an easy fix—especially when he learned the desired flight had plenty of space. Gossieaux was even willing to pay a fee for something he blamed on the Air France interface: “I order stuff online all the time and if there is an overnight situation I expect the site to alert me to this.” But no amount of cajolery, however solicitous, would cause Air France to budge. He would have to buy a new ticket, they said, and he did—on Air Lingus.
“In these bad economic times, you would expect companies whose service[s] are going to be the first to be cut from personal and business budgets to do everything they can to hold on to their customers,” he notes, “especially if it does not cost them a dime to accommodate the change request which would satisfy the customer, and perhaps make up for their deficient product offering.”
The Point: There will be times when you cannot meet a customer’s expectations—but be prepared for very public fallout if your position doesn’t sound reasonable to most people.
Cheers, Skip
Source: Emergence Marketing.
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As fallout from the current economic crisis continues to mount, thoughtful people are beginning to ask what we can learn from this experience. In a post at Harvard Business Online, Bill Taylor highlights a Warren Buffett interview on Charlie Rose in which the billionaire investor responds to the question “Should wise people have known better?” in the affirmative, with the note that there’s a natural progression when things go wrong:
Innovation
Imitation
Idiocy
An innovator spots an untapped opportunity; the imitator attempts to capitalize on its merit; finally, explains Taylor, the idiot goes and apes the imitator, and with avarice “undoes the very innovations [he is] trying to use to get rich.”
According to Taylor, avoiding this cycle means developing the ability to distinguish between “genuine innovation” and “mindless imitation.” In other words, he asks, “Are you prepared to walk away from ideas that promise to make money [when] they make no sense?” Taylor, like Buffett, concedes this is easier said than done when you see competition heading in a particular direction and fear you’ll never catch up if you don’t join the charge. It takes discipline, notes Taylor, to remain conscious of the difference—taking advantage of innovation without getting caught up in the idiocy.
The Point: “[D]on’t use the financial crisis as an excuse to stop taking chances or downsize your ambitions,” says Taylor. “But do use the crisis as an opportunity to take stock of what really matters—and to stop looking over your shoulder.”
Cheers, Skip
Source: Harvard Business Online.
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In a video from BNET, Edward Muzio of Group Harmonics explains how email conversations can start unnecessary fights. “It happens all the time,” he says. “It starts out as a simple bit of information; turns first into a discussion; then an argument; finally our inbox is full of emails back and forth. No one knows what’s going on.”
The reason this happens is simple—and surprising. In conversation, says Muzio, words account for a paltry seven percent of the information we perceive. And since an email exchange makes it virtually impossible to convey visual cues (55 percent) and tone (38 percent), your recipient might “hear” something you didn’t intend. Muzio illustrates his point by placing stress on various words to demonstrate how the same sentence can carry a number of meanings:
I didn’t say you have an attitude problem (or, don’t blame me—someone else said it).
I didn’t say you have an attitude problem (or, I said that about someone else, not you).
I didn’t say you have an attitude problem (or, you have a problem alright, but not with your attitude).
The solution, argues Muzio, is restricting email communications to facts and data—deadlines, appointments, new policies and the like. Once a discussion veers into emotional content, it’s time to pick up the phone or, better yet, drop in for a face-to-face conversation.
If you choose the right medium for the right conversation, you can keep preventable drama to a minimum—and concentrate your energy on Marketing Inspiration, not Crisis Management.
Cheers, Skip
Source: MarketingProfs newsletter 11/07/08
Crumbs from the Scone
Now’s your chance to bid on a website from Shadowbend Studios! I have donated a Budget Website Solutions package
http://www.shadowbendstudios.com/budget_website_solutions.html to the “Bid For Kids” auction at John Baldwin Elementary School (where my kids are attending kindergarten). Check out the online auction listing here…
http://auction.bidforkids.com/Bidding.taf?_function=detail&Auction_uid1=1738580
Bidding has just begun so there is still time to get one of my websites for a VERY good price!
Take Care,Skip
Crumbs from the Scone
Even if you’ve never heard the term tag cloud, you’ve likely seen them in your online travels: clusters of keywords relevant to a site’s content, rendered in varying font sizes and shades, and often found on the left or right navigation bars. “Flikr, the photo sharing site, was the first high-profile website to use tag clouds,” writes Barry Harrigan in a post at Accelerating IT Sales, “while the origins of tag clouds can be traced back to Douglas Coupland’s 1995 Microserfs.”
You can check out Harrigan’s original post to see examples of the tag clouds he generated at websites like these:
TagCrowd. “After a little tweaking on my part to remove some irrelevant words such as … ‘permalink,'” he notes, “[I] was rewarded with [a] nifty visualization of the content on this site.”
Tag Cloud Generator. “[I]t was easy to use,” says Harrigan, “didn’t require that I register, and created a visually appealing cloud tag.”
MakeCloud. This service displays fewer tags than Tag Cloud, he says, but all accurately reflect his blog’s content.
“Tag clouds are an interesting way to quickly scan a site to figure out if its content is relevant to [a customer’s] needs,” writes Harrigan. “[They] can use tag clouds to search for topical information without having to come up with specific search terms on [their] own.”
The Point: Find that silver lining. Try forming a tag cloud to boost user interest—and clicks—at your site.
Cheers, Skip
Source: Accelerating IT Sales.
