Marketing Technology Blog

If you don’t see the What is Social Media video, please click through to the post.

What does social media mean to business?

• Listen – Hear what your customers are saying.
• Learn – Identify your brand advocates and detractors.
• Engage – Interact with communities that are passionate about your brand.
• Protect – Secure your online reputation.

Absolutely love the message from Visible Technologies, What is Social Media?

Do you have to be a technology expert to be a leader in Marketing? Marketing and technology seem to have converged over the last twenty years.

Even copywriters need to understand how people read pages – performing A/B testing, recognizing whitespace usage, and viewing heat maps. Brand managers distribute branding guides that are composed of pixel widths, relevant colors and associative words to the brand… all tested and proven with technology. Direct marketers have to understand dynamic print and database marketing.

These are just a few of the examples, but it’s fascinating to me that the Vice President of Marketing in today’s world has to be much more in tune with the capabilities and feedback loops available with technology than they did many years ago.

I remember walking into a VP’s office once when I worked at a newspaper and they said, “What is it that a Database Marketing Manager does?” That was almost 10 years ago and I was absolutely shocked! In all honesty, that person understood word association, copy writing and page layouts… nothing else. They also didn’t last long…

While most companies grow and the job gets funneled into more definition, the Marketing leader has expanded. Even the web marketing management has to understand search engine optimization, search engine marketing, design, branding, conversion optimization, copy writing, A/B testing, analytics, heat mapping… to name a few!

Are you a marketing leader who doesn’t depend on technology? I’d love to hear some arguments to this. I don’t believe a marketing leader has to know the nitty gritty of these technologies nor how to implement them… they have resources for that. However, having an understanding of the technologies seems a must in my book.

The new year is two days away. Every year, nearly half of all Americans make New Year’s Resolutions, but most don’t keep them. We use the start of a fresh calendar to try to inspire dramatic change, but it doesn’t always work. That’s why talking about How NOT To Make New Year’s Resolutions is the first event of the year long 2010 Productivity Series hosted by Slaughter Development. (Keep reading for a special discount!) There is a better way to set and meet goals, especially with regard to how you use marketing technology to promote your business and your brand.

The Three Types of Objectives

A key reason why we fail to keep our New Year’s Resolutions is because they are made up of the wrong type of objective. Consider the following major categories of goals:

• Vague Goals – If your new year’s resolution is to “Get into shape” or “Grow your business”, you’re probably not going to succeed. That might sound good on paper but how will you know if you are making progress? How will you know when you’ve achieved that goal?
• Result Goals – Often our new year’s resolutions are based on outcomes. For example, you might resolve to “lose twenty pounds” or “increase sales by 25%.” These are better than vague goals because they can be measured, but often are influenced by circumstances that are out of our control. Goal setting should be more about work than results.
• Process Goals – These are the best kinds of objectives because they characterize what you want to do. They are dependent more on effort than they are on random chance. Consider the resolution to “work out four times a week” or “reach out to three new prospects each day.” These dreams can be made a reality through hard work. You don’t need your metabolism or the market to cooperate.

Goalsetting with Marketing and Technology

Here are some terrible ways to set goals for your marketing and technology use next year. Don’t make these your resolutions:

• Increase newsletter open rate by 10%
• Double my RSS followers
• Develop a more compelling advertising campaign for flagship products
• Optimize my use of WordPress plugins

These goals are either vague or too results-oriented. Instead, try changing them into these versions, which focus on the process you will use in the future:

• Do an A/B test to try out a new newsletter design
• Improve metrics on analyzing RSS readers
• Try crowdsourcing a new ad
• Reserve time to judiciously review my current WordPress plugins

Interested in learning more about New Year’s Resolutions and Technology? Sign up for “How NOT To Make New Year’s Resolutions at Work” on Wednesday, January 6 @ 2:00PM here in Indianapolis. The first four people to register online with the discount code MKTGTECH will receive a surprise discount! Sign up today!

This is an advertisement from the May, 1916, copy of Popular Mechanics from AT&T speaking to potential telephone subscribers.

I often wonder how difficult it was to overcome the fear and trepidation such a technology must have caused at the time. I also wonder how it compares to social media adoption and the Internet today.

History almost always repeats itself.

Telephones, like the Internet, significantly changed lives. In 1926, the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee even posed the question, “Do modern inventions help or mar character and health?“

It seems with this advertisement, AT&T was easing the public’s fear of the technology and instead, showing how it empowered them.

Seems that this ad could easily be republished today:

In the development of the Internet, the user is the dominant factor. Their ever-growing requirements inspire invention, lead to endless scientific research, and make necessary vast improvements and extensions.

Neither brands nor money are spared to build up the Internet, to amplify the user’s power to the limit. In the Internet you have the most complete mechanism in the world for communication. It is animated by the broadest spirit of service, and you dominate and control it in the double capacity of the user and the data provider. The Internet cannot think or talk for you, but carries your thought where you will. It is yours to use.

Without the co-operation of the user, all that has been done to perfect the system is useless and proper service cannot be given. For example, even though tens of billions were spent to build the Internet, it is silent if the person at the other end fails to use it.

The Internet is essentially democratic; it carries the voice of the child and the grown-up with equal speed and directness. And because each user is a dominant factor in the Internet, the Internet is the most democratic that could be provided for the world.

It is not only the implement of the individual, but it fulfills the needs of all the people.