While trying to start my car the other day, I heard that terrible clicking sound that you hear when the key doesn’t do what it is supposed to. I also felt that instant of internal disappointment, knowing that something I trusted had suddenly let me down. A few more times turning the key didn’t change things; the battery was dead. (The next sound I heard was the clinking of money ringing in my ears). I was going to have to find another way to get to work.

Then it hit me: the dead battery was a lot like some email marketing campaigns I’ve seen. You know when you see a brilliant subject line from a trusted sender, you open the email, and are disappointed by the content? It turns out not to be the insightful and enjoyable read you thought you were getting, but instead just another lame pitch. Don’t be the dead battery in your reader’s inbox.

Try #2:

While eating ice cream one hot afternoon with the kids, I found it hard to keep the ice cream from melting down the cone and all over my hands. They never give you enough napkins at the ice cream shop window, so you’re forced to deal with about a quart of vanilla nut crunch dripping all over the car and trying to mop it up with a single-ply tissue the size of a business card.

My first thought was about how this was exactly like dealing with email deliverability issues. Every time you think you have it licked, the spammers find another loophole and force the ISPs to make changes that catch your legitimate emails in the dragnet. Your email service provider’s compliance department is already catching up to current best practices, and now they, like the tiny napkin, are hopelessly outpaced and saturated with hot fudge and jimmies.

Try #3:

While crossing the street downtown, I stood by the crosswalk for a good fifteen minutes waiting for the cars to stop. Stopping for walkers is the law in my state, but motorists see that as more of a suggestion than a moving violation. Finally, somebody stopped; a nice, little old lady in a 1984 Buick (in mint condition, of course). I waved and stepped out, cars honked, hand gestures were offered, vulgarities were issued, and then I was nearly run down by cars going in the other direction.

“This is exactly like email compliance,” I realized. One good email marketer sends their perfectly compliant, well-messaged, highly-engaging, double opt-in email, while all the other messages in the inbox are like the other drivers on the road, honking, gesturing, screaming for attention. The legitimate email marketer is in a tough bind; how to get read while surrounded by so much nonsense?

@myleftone: So marketers: How far can you stretch the spin? #marketingspin

What is the best email address to use for your email marketing messages?

If you’re struggling with this question for your own campaigns, congrats! You’re thinking pretty deeply about optimizing engagement and interactivity with your readers. There are basically two schools of thought: 1) Your readers want a ‘personal’ approach and will respond to an email from their friendly sales executive named Joe instead of an impersonal, faceless corporation, or; 2) Your readers understand your brand and will welcome news and updates from your company, but will feel ‘tricked’ by your attempt to use a personal name.

Notice, in both cases, I assume you have an opt-in relationship with your readers.

When you want to purge your own inbox, where do you start? Do you line up all the emails from “Company ” and delete the group (like I do)? Do you then go after the “Joe ” or “Company ” emails? If you’re like me, maybe you save the ones from “Joe ” for last. Unless I’ve heard of the company, it’s gone. If I haven’t heard of the person, it gets read, but boy will I be ticked if it’s junk. Maybe enough to hit the spam button.

So what do you do? I hate to say this, but it depends. It depends on who you are, what your company does, what your readers want, how they found you, and which way the wind was blowing that day. Since you can’t segment based on the whimsical nature of reader expectations, you can at least play the percentages, so here are a few tips to help choose which approach is right for you:

Use the “news@” (or “sales@”, “updates@”, “stuff@”, etc.) approach if:

• Your brand is well-known to your customer base. If your readers and their grandmothers know your company but couldn’t pick the CEO out of a lineup (like almost any restaurant chain), you should use your company name to send the email.
• Your brand has a personal approach to messaging. If you position your company as more like a friend than a business (airlines come to mind), you should maintain that friendship without complicating things.
• Your brand scores well for quality, reliability, service or other measures of trust. If you just plain make the best. Period. And your readers know it, you’re in brand nirvana. Use your brand as the foundation for your campaigns.

Use the “Joe@” approach if:

• Your business is built on personal relationships. If the first impression your company makes with most of its followers is through a sales executive at a conference or a regional sales agent, that person should be the name sending the email.
• Your business is centered around a celebrity or personality. If your CEO is a well-known visionary who overshadows the technology and even the company, make your emails a personal communique from the CEO (Really, do you want an email from Martha, or from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia?).
• Your business has a rich, personal engagement approach. If your company is built on superior service, or technical know-how, put one of your technical people in front of your readers with tips, updates and best practices to form a solid relationship. Some companies even make up a person (think car insurance) and use that character’s name for campaigns. But ideally, authenticity counts.

If your business is large enough to need different approaches with different segments, you’ve got a lot of work ahead. If not, and you have a pretty good evaluation of your brand, the tips above should help you decide whether you are “Updates@company.com” or just “Joe”.

This past Saturday was one of those great summer (finally!) days when the weather was warm enough for me to crank up the A/C and drag the kids on some slightly too long journey. I took my two babies to a wooded area near the house, intent on forcing them into some kind of outdoor fun.

We weren’t alone; There were mountain bikers gearing up for their rides, trail runners stretching out, people cleaning up the parking area, and even the softball teams were warming up. The sky was as blue as it gets. There was even a breeze coming off the reservoir. It was one of those days.

Always bring two of everything on the trail.

So we set out hiking. We climbed high above the ballfield on a steep singletrack, and made a few switchbacks until the kids started yelling. They wanted to walk on their own. I did that quick look around that every parent does, to make sure there was nothing really dangerous nearby, like a hornets’ nest or a cliff (and more importantly, to make sure there were no other parents who might think I was being irresponsible by letting my kids go free with something really dangerous nearby, like hornets’ nest or a cliff). Then I took off the pack and released the kids.

Kids are funny this way. Despite all the teaching and guidance I offer them, they seem to know best when they are ready for a new challenge. Yeah, I know, I’m the parent, and I decide when to do this and that and all blah blah blah blah. The truth is, kids come with built-in switches that trigger impulses and needs. They know when they are hungry, thirsty, tired, ready to go home, cold, warm, and so on. The trick is just getting them to communicate it. Or figuring out the signals yourself. My kids clearly wanted to hike on their own. I let them. Case closed.

As marketers, we use all kinds of metrics and reports to tell us what’s going on with our business. Our campaigns have numbers like cost per lead, cost per impression, subscription tally, revenue per lead, average customer value, average customer duration, sales cycle, etc. And we follow them. They tell us what to do less of, what to do more of, and what to try. But there is a huge component to our decision-making that is best described as ‘guesswork’.

But it’s not really guessing, really. Any marketer can tell innately what is going on with the business. Just being immersed in the trade show circuit, reading marketing articles, sites, blogs, and attending conferences, as well as reading between the lines of your own efforts can tell you what is up. Sometimes you just know, like kids who are ready to walk the trail with you, that it’s time to try something you haven’t before, or that it’s time to rebuild an old campaign idea.

I’m not saying put down the metrics and shred the reports, but I am saying ‘Trust yourself.’ If you’re mulling an idea over that you just feel right about, try it. If you don’t feel right yet, maybe you need more info, or maybe your gut is right about that, too. Decisions are opportunities. Let’s make some.

And the more, the merrier, right? So throw all kinds of budget at the wall. Banner campaigns. Events. Lists. Who cares how you do it, just flood the joint with leads. Leads galore. Leads up to your eyeballs. You want to be sifting through sales prospects until you can’t see straight. You’re swimming in a pool full of 24-karat gold-plated leads. You’re in the money!

Except you’re not.

Once you’ve gathered hundreds of names from people with varying interest in your business, you have to start calling each one of them. Some names may be real gems with the budget, the need, and the authority to buy, but the rest are fools’ gold. A waste of your time. You’ll probably never find the right ones. You’ve got way too many leads. Is that possible?

Damn straight it is. It’s not only possible to wind up with too many leads, but it goes on in sales offices all across the country. You may be surprised to hear is that even well-run campaigns based on brilliant material aimed at highly-targeted audiences can deliver a long list of names that is 80% useless. Why does this happen? The answer is that the need for a big list of raw names often trumps their quality. Number is easier to measure than quality, and marketing leaders like you are often compensated for the raw number instead of quality measurements.

Why? Quality takes time. It might be two years before a lead you hauled in pans out, and by then you’ve already done the ‘see-me-in-my-office-bring-a-box-for-all-your-stuff’ dance with the boss. When sales flag, marketing gets the pole.

So what do you do?

First, fight the need to haul in huge numbers of raw leads. Don’t be afraid to ask the burning questions. If people are really interested in your product, they’ll give you the answers you need. Ask for this kind of information:

• Name
• Title
• Role (Decision-Maker? Influencer? Recommender? Freaking Intern?)
• Company
• State
• Zip
• Email
• Phone
• Website
• Company Size (Employees)
• Reason for Search (Why are you looking for a new solution?)
• Budget for Solution
• Current Solution (Do you use a similar product now?)
• Decision Timeframe (When do you plan to buy?)
• Source (How did you find us?)
• Have Sales Contact Me (Check the box)
• Newsletter Opt-In (Check the box)

And depending on your industry, there may be many more dimensions you can ask about. And be honest; don’t try to trick people by calling it a ‘quiz’ or taking them through several form pages. If you gather this information, you can use it in two ways: to filter people completely out of the lead process, to be nurtured by an automated email campaign; or you can hand over everything to sales, and they’ll decide who to call first.

I know what you’re thinking; “My boss will never allow me to ask these things. He wants leads no matter what their interest.” You just have to ask, “If they’re not interested, why do we want their names?”

The truth is, in this era, it has never been easier to gather names. Your company can mine LinkedIn and other business intelligence vendors. You can get 70,000 Twitter followers by sticking a few interns on the project. You can throw budget at a bunch of banner and PPC campaigns and gather trainloads of people who will never buy anything. If you just want names to waste your sales organization’s time with, that’s easy.

Today marketing is about the targeted process. To make your sales organization happy, don’t firehose them with a list of 80% lousy leads. Hand over the best 20%. The lousy leads will be there when you need them.

Which you won’t.

• Hotmail’s new ‘Trusted Senders’ icon visually identifies authenticated email, protecting recipients from phishing scams.
• The ‘Sweep’ feature allows readers in all Windows Live Hotmail clients to ‘sweep’ away incoming email from senders they’ve never engaged with into the trash as it comes in.
• ‘Time traveling’ filters allow Microsoft to retroactively remove emails that make it to the inbox if your reputation is found to be poor and the email has not yet been read.
• ‘One-click’ filters allow recipients to sort incoming emails by source type, putting only their known contacts at the top, while emails from email marketing senders fall to the bottom.
• ‘Prompted unsubscribe’ asks recipients who never open your emails if they want to unsubscribe. If they do, and you still send to them, you will be blocked.

So what can you do about it?

• Number one, get reacquainted with your email tracking and reporting tools. You will need benchmarks for your campaigns, specifically to Windows Live Hotmail, so you can see how performance changes.
• Next, start segmenting your Hotmail recipients into their own group, and customizing your email campaigns for them. For instance, you should send re-engagement campaigns more often, and ask to join your recipients’ contact lists.
• All of the ‘best practices’ stuff you try to do, such as clear subject lines, moderation in graphics, strong HTML coding, avoiding text triggers, and clean list management need to be used for all of your recipients, especially Hotmail.
• Add a clear unsubscribe message to the top of your emails, and honor unsubscribe requests without delay. This will avoid spam complaints and help recipients trust you as a sender.
• Use DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to increase confidence even further.

In short, if you use best practices across all of your email campaigns, you can avoid losing your reputation as a trusted sender, and only with care and practice will you keep getting delivered to Hotmail users on a regular basis. Windows Live Hotmail is making a list and checking it twice. Don’t be on it.

For more, read this excellent article by Tom Sathers at ReturnPath.

But what about dynamic info, that changes over time? For instance, are people ready to buy?

That’s where decision staging comes in. A decision stage is a unique point in time a B2B prospect is in during the lead cycle. It’s another way to segment leads, because they have such different needs in each stage that we may as well treat them like different people. This affects how we find them, how we evaluate them, and how we pitch them.

We all have our own ideas about marketing process. Here are my five B2B buyer decision stages:

1. Problem-Solving. This is the first stage where a B2B buyer realizes a need for a new solution. We marketers hardly ever hear about this person unless we have consulting partners that cover our industry, or have massive ad budgets that make it impossible for buyers to miss us. The method for this stage is not a push strategy, but a consultative approach focused on detailed technological discussions with content experts. This stage is the biggest reason we need social media, partnerships, blogs, forums, associations, and networks.

2. Solution-Seeking. In this stage, the person has an idea what they need and is searching for a company to provide it. At this point the solutions can vary widely. If a prospect finds you at this stage, your material should be crisp and oriented toward the value of your solution. Your company’s experience and capabilities play a large role in this stage. And that should be amplified through your expert webinars, white papers, and thought-leadership. It’s clear why your presence in the previous stage can build credibility for this one.

3. Criteria Development. Now your buyers have found which companies seem to offer a relevant solution, and are developing decision criteria. If this is your first contact with prospects, they are likely interested in your spec sheets, because they’ve compiled checklists and will toss your company in or out based on how well you match up. Your benefit statements are nice, but ultimately the question is: Do you deliver or not? It’s best if the criteria already match your product, because the customers found you in the first or second stage.

At this point I’ll be Captain Obvious: As it gets later in the lead cycle when prospects find us, the worse off we are. By stage 3, they’ve already determined the problem, how to solve it, and which companies probably can. After stage 3, buyers are just rounding out the field to justify the decision they already have in mind. Still, many companies focus their marketing efforts on the last two stages:

4. Application Testing. If this is when prospects find you, during a final sweep for companies that meet their criteria, this is when they’ll register for free trials, watch videos, grab brochures at trade shows, click on your paid search ad, and sign up to win the iPod you’re giving away. Your cost per lead might be lower at this stage, but there’s a reason; the close rate will be almost nil given that this person has not heard of you during the first three stages.

5. Final Purchase. This is the default value for how marketers and sales execs treat most prospects. We assume they are ready to buy, so we speak to them that way. We tell them how much money they will save or how much faster their systems will be, because we know we’re trying to influence a decision that is already made. This is where the big money is spent on publications, online banners and email lists, and this is where the traditional marketing metrics are well known: Impressions, Opens, Clicks, Eyeballs, Views, and Conversions. We all know how low these rates tend to be. For many reasons, the final purchase stage is almost always inappropriate for B2B marketers, but we do a ton of it.

So how do you manage these five stages? First, I admit that the categories are simplistic. They are meant to easily identify what message, what material, and what method we should use for each stage. Secondly, I understand that not everybody has the same business needs. But in general, the earlier a prospect learns about you, the better. If your company is out there with consultative discussions, technical materials, benefit statements, crisp differentiation, and thought-leadership, you will be in the catbird seat, and someone else will be the afterthought.

It may be irritating when you get a prospect who is a year from making a decision, but it’s powerful information to have. And it beats learning about that prospect a year later, when it’s too late.

Meanwhile, your marketing friends, who work for hip, zany companies that make extreme sports equipment and MMORPG software, all have interactive sites, blogs, Facebook fan pages and personal Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers. They talk in vector and get face time with Brogan while you plod out another 1998-vintage PowerPoint deck and pack your plain, black Velcro booth for next week’s trade show in Poughkeepsie.

Does any of this sound a little too close to home? Been there. It’s hard to build your social media cred when you can’t make the case for it to your company leaders. A lot of the social media gurus got out from under their leadership and opened their own shops exactly because of old-school thinking in the B2B world. They got sick of hearing the following:

• “My kids waste their time on this crap all day.”
• “A guy I used to work with said this is a waste of time.”
• “How many of these followers are leads?”
• “I don’t want some blog where pissed off customers can comment.”
• “We’re paying you too much to waste hours a day on this.”
• “We’re not MTV.”

(It’s probably even worse when your boss finds out about Twitter and demands that you get an account but has no idea what to do with it. I haven’t experienced that, but I’m sorry if I opened any old wounds.)

A lot of companies that use social media well treat it as a top-down initiative. Leadership is fully behind it, understands it, and probably uses it. You absolutely will not be able to run a social media strategy without leadership, so how do you get your boss to understand social media?

• The first step is to find companies with similar profiles that use social media to great effect. Case studies about Martha Stewart and Dr. Pepper won’t help you at all with your gasket company. You may have competitors that use social media, and hopefully they are eating your lunch, which will help you make the case. Use fear. Irrational fear. As boring as bosses may be, they do not want to fall behind those evil bastards down the freeway.
• Simultaneously, you should develop a network of advocates at your company. You will need them to support the strategy and even take responsibility for parts of it, so they better be involved in selling it. They can help you antagonize the bosses about how competitors are using social media to build a community that should have been yours.
• Now, appeal to the boss’ inner networker. There’s a good chance your boss understands exactly why the company joined several industry groups, and why he goes to the conferences every quarter, even if nothing seems to come of it. Social media is just the same thing done online, and it’s likely the trade associations already have a social media presence. The first time your boss gets a tweet from one of his trusted network associates, it will be an exciting moment.
• Next, you have to set expectations. Social media is not about leads. It is about communities, and these communities help to spread your messages to where they might be found by interested prospects. Tracking this kind of activity will be tough, so make sure the expectations for leads are almost nil. Trust me, you don’t want to oversell this point.
• Throughout this process, you’ve got to deliver the bread and butter. The boring stuff. Your job. Or your boss will never let you get away from the presentations and the trade shows.
• Finally, you have to develop a plan. True, most of the social media gurus with the 100,000+ followers never bothered to create a plan before they jumped in, but they didn’t work for your boss. You need a PowerPoint. Sorry. But hey, if another dull grey slideshow means getting your blog up and running, as well as your Facebook page, your library of Flash demos and and videos for YouTube, and your oncoming Tweetslaught of knowledgable posts on the glories of using gaskets made by you instead of the evil bastards down the freeway, isn’t it worth it?

And your 60,000+ followers will be a nice touch.

(The truth is, I’ve never worked for someone who saw any value whatsoever in social media, and I wasn’t able to sell it to the boss. So my opportunity to jump on the social media bandwagon was spent doing old-school stuff; powerpoint decks, data sheets, press releases. I know, I know. That’s another post.)

But like everyone else, I do have an opinion on how best to use social media to grow your business. That’s what it is ultimately about, right? Growing your business? Building a base of people in your community, so that you have a wealth of knowledge and experience to draw on to help you deliver a finely-honed service or product to the people who are willing to pay you for it? Creating mind-share? Getting noticed?

I’m looking for all of that, too, and the advice I’ve found on how to use social media in my marketing strategy follows a massive bell curve. The range seems to break down like this:

The advice in the middle approaches a ‘best practices’ tactic for social media in marketing. Although I think we’re still a long way from that. If you are a thought-leader who publishes new material all the time, social media is exactly what you need it to be. You can gain a massive following and if you’re good, you can monetize that following.

But a cookie-cutter strategy won’t cover everyone. No more than a great cookie recipe will help you make a cheeseburger. If you’re selling air conditioner parts, the best social media model really isn’t there yet. If customers found out about you through Twitter, it’s a safe bet you’re a long way from a sale. You should use social media to build a community and get links, but not leads. And that reality will drive your strategy more than anything else. For the average B2B company, social media is still a luxury.

So if you’re not a constant online publisher, why worry about strategy? You’re still in the “Just Do It!” stage. Jump in.

Look at email marketing, which was the Wild West about ten years ago, but is now a (variably) respected marketing and communications tool that offers tracking, best practices, compliance guidelines, and an entire realm of best practices and expertise. Social media looks at email marketing the way email marketing looks at postcards. The strategy will come.

I’m not going to prescribe any specific approach, except to suggest that you take advice that works well for a publishing model with a grain of salt. In ten years it will be easy to know the best way to use social media, but today, despite all the hollering, we know nothing. I’m just saying; “Relax!”

HTML5 might be awesome, but somebody (Google? Adobe? Anyone? Bueller?) needs to build a developer/designer app

A rundown of these social media success stories usually includes the following:

• Oprah Winfrey
• Ashton Kutcher
• CNN
• Walmart
• Apple
• Skittles
• Marriott
• Kodak
• McDonald’s
• CVS
• Hershey’s
• Staples
• Intel
• Cisco
• UPS
• The Home Depot
• PepsiCo
• Discovery Channel

Do you notice what they all they have in common? They all existed before the rise of social media. Beyond that, they were all huge before the rise of social media.

Oprah, for example, got famous for creating one of the better daytime talk shows, and making it the cornerstone of her media empire. Every day, she touched a nerve with viewers and guests, and stayed away from the circus atmosphere of some other daytime shows (you know who I mean). She covered topics that were touching and interesting, and developed a brand that was largely based on her personality and interests.

In other words, she was a social element before the medium she could really exploit was even born. And you might notice that her show is still on television, and is still the foundation of her empire. Her followers would not be her followers without it. So is Oprah really a social media success story?

Similarly, Ashton Kutcher was not unknown before the rise of Twitter. It turns out he was already a very talented and funny actor, and the star of a hit television show, a veteran of several movies, a teen magazine heartthrob, and his posters graced the walls of girls’ bedrooms everywhere before he ever sent his first Tweet. Without all that, he’d probably be a geeky-but-dreamy guy working at Wal-Mart, known for his ability to make friends, but not a social media legend.

While we’re on the subject, Kutcher challenged CNN to gain more Twitter followers. He won, and claimed the victory showed that “Social media and social news outlets can become as powerful as the major news outlets.”

But CNN still seems to be standing. 90 million people subscribe to it through their cable providers and several million viewers tune in each day. Kutcher relies on reruns, movies, Nikon ads and tabloid covers to keep his name on everyone’s mind. When he covers a foreign war, humanitarian disaster, or the daily economic report using only his Twitter account, I’ll be impressed.

Speaking of Wal-Mart, you might have noticed that the company is larger than some countries in revenue and total square footage. This had nothing to do with social media, and neither will the company’s future. Wal-Mart’s only possible strategy with social media is to strengthen its relationship with followers, most of whom shop there only because of low prices (based on forcing its manufacturers to exploit slave labor overseas).

Apple took a lot of flak until very recently for being late to the party, and even discouraging the use of social media tools. The company is now on board, but with such a dedicated base of followers and some of the most innovative consumer-oriented multimedia tools, it’s surprising they didn’t lead. Apple’s finally building outposts using social media is not an example of a success story.

Skittles are tasty, fruity sugar drops that got to be one of the biggest sellers before the Internet was even around, so what is the point of a candy having a website anyway? Well, the Skittles marketers thought the same thing and replaced their website with a Twitter window and a little Flash with promotional offers and links to Facebook and YouTube. It’s brilliant, but is it a social media success? Skittles isn’t even a company. It’s just a brand sold by Wrigley Bros., which in turn is owned by Mars, Inc.

So what exactly is a social media success story?

It has to go beyond creating an outpost and generating buzz. A true social media success story should have been virtually unknown before using social media, and should be a legitimate business. A business is something that fills a market need, has a sustainable revenue model, and has the potential to enrich more than just the owner, but also its community, industry and audience. A lot of people make money from their blog, and they advertise their blog through social media, but have they created something that can continue to operate and adds value for others?

There are a few examples:

Zappos
http://blog.davemadethat.com/2008/07/09/communication-20-zappos-a-social-media-success-story-interview-with-tony-hsieh/

Bacon Salt
http://www.baconsalt.com/

Cold Stone Creamery
http://social-media-optimization.com/2007/07/social-media-marketing-success-stories/

MyWorkButterfly
http://mashable.com/2009/04/28/grow-social-network/

Indium
Finally – a success story that more closely matches every marketer’s situation: How to take an existing business with a small budget and little name recognition and gain market share using social media.

http://www.indium.com/