Marketing Technology Blog

I’ve been using Google Wave now for a number of months. When I first heard about Wave, I thought it sounded like it might be interesting. I then watched the incredibly long video about the tool and was overwhelmed by the power and potential of what seemed to be a pending revolution in online communication.

After requesting an invite and finally receiving access to the service I slowly began picking up connections to other friends and colleagues that also had access to Google Wave. For a communication tool, it makes it far less helpful if you can’t talk to the people you’re regularly interacting with anyway on a daily basis.

Google Wave promises to provide opportunities for organizing events, sharing communication and documents evenly distributed. You can share photos, ideas, videos, notes, documents, and even games all on the same platform within an existing browser window.

The reality is I still haven’t experienced the real revolution in communication for myself. The most extended use I’ve seen from Google Wave is the collaboration I’ve done with a friend of mine that’s writing for one of my blogs. We share goals, ideas, questions and strategies with each other in a Wave and it works well.

I’m still waiting for it to really take off though. I think the way they could put the use into overdrive would be to almost replace the existing Gmail functionality with Google Wave. Oh, and while they’re at it, just incorporate Google Documents and Google Chat in there as well. Maybe even a sprinkle of Google Groups to carry over as well.

I still think Google Wave will revolutionize online communication. I just don’t think it’s going to happen until an even wider user base is capable of getting on the platform and other Google services are either incorporated or eliminated.

One of the more interesting demos held at ExactTarget Connections, yesterday, was the real-time interactive demonstration done by Scott Dorsey, CEO, during the opening speech.

Scott asked everyone to text the word research and their email address to 38767 to obtain Forrester’s 2009 Channel Preference Study and Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power.

In real-time, a text message response was sent back confirming the request and asking if you’d also like to receive a voice message from David Daniels, Vice President and Principal Analyst for Forrester Research. An email also arrived from Scott Dorsey with the information you requested (above).

If you replied with DAVID to the response message, your phone rang a few minutes later with the following voice message:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

ExactTarget is looking to take this type of campaign a step further this year by actually bridging the phone call between the two parties so you can have an actual conversation.

This is an effective use of email, voice and mobile marketing in a single multi-channel campaign. Our mobile technology blogger, Adam Small, has done similar campaigns for his Real Estate clients and lifted their close rates significantly.

As of today, my list of books to read just got one deeper. I had the pleasure of speaking at the Online Marketing Summit in Houston on behalf of Compendium Blogware.

At the summit was also Steven Woods of Eloqua. Steven’s keynote and panel conversations were insightful and thought provoking. Steven has released the book, Digital Body Language – Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World:

Marketing is undergoing a major shift that has been brought on by the change in the way people find and consume information. Whether it is Google’s ability to make the information resources of the Internet searchable or social media’s ability to connect people with peers for credible opinions on products and services, the way in which we access information and search for products has fundamentally changed.

The topic of Steve’s keynote was: How to better understand your customers’ online behavior and profit from it. Steven advises companies who wish to grow their marketing and increase their sales to:

1. Unleash your info.
2. Think like a buyer.
3. Take data seriously.
4. Build a culture of analytics.

The messaging remained consistent throughout the summit – utilize tools effectively, utilize data to increase relevance and results with your customers and prospects, and always measure. Consistently, all speakers again pushed attendees to maximize their search engine optimization efforts.

On Social Media

Colleague Richard Evans from Silverpop had some compelling results of embedding social media and bookmarking links within emails. Links to Digg outperformed most, but additional links to promote the messaging in Facebook performed well, too. Richard promised a follow up whitepaper on how social links perform in email. Perhaps I can get an early copy to share a preview with you folks!

Email’s Role is still Critical

Long time friend, mentor, and public speaker Joel Book did a fantastic job of describing the evolution of marketing and how email continues to play an essential role in our day to day communications. At Compendium, we utilize ExactTarget and 5Buckets extensively to trigger education campaigns from Salesforce.

Email continues to enhance our communications to our clients without the need to add human resources. ExactTarget plays a critical role in our ability to grow our clients’ productivity, which in turn improves their results… and ultimately leads to improved retention.

In the social media realm, it’s no surprise that both Facebook and Twitter are utilizing email effectively as a push methodology to keep their users engaged and returning to their respective web sites.

This week at work, one of our clients was asking what the “other” traffic source in Google Analytics (GA).

There’s not too much detail in the actual interface for Google Analytics so you have to do some digging. Traffic sources are also known as the medium in GA. I did some digging and found that Google Analytics captures the medium automatically for some other mediums, the most prominent being email.

To find the list of the other mediums, you need to click on Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources. This will provide you with a list of all your sources of traffic as well as the mediums. There is a dropdown where you can filter to the actual medium, too, to show all the other traffic sources.
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This can be a very useful tool. If you’re utilizing email marketing to drive traffic back to your website, you can measure how well you’re doing by adding a querystring that specifies the medium:

http://marketingtechblog.com?utm_medium=email

There are quite a few parameters available if you wish to measure your campaigns.