Less than a month after it launched in late June, Google+ had over 25 million registered users — a milestone that took Twitter 29 months, and Facebook 3 years to reach. Have you tried it yet? Or are you waiting to see whether it’s a useful tool for multi-channel marketing? If you haven’t made up your […]
Multi-Channel Marketing.
Managing Complex Marketing Projects
Multichannel marketing is a given for most marketers. None of us can afford to bet our company’s success by trying to reach our customers through just one channel. In large, distributed marketing organizations where creative and brand management are handled at the corporate level and local or field sales and marketing organizations execute their own […]
How Engaged Are Your Customers?
Jasmine is a mixed-breed dog adopted from the Las Vegas dog pound. She’s a great dog. That’s her in the photo — patiently enduring being posed with a catalog of high-end dog beds while wearing a pair of silly eye glasses. Most of the time, she did what she was asked, (which was to look directly at the […]
Four Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead
By Deb McAlister-Holland On April 15, 2010, IDC analysts Frank Gens and Amy Konary presented an executive briefing called The Maturing Cloud: What the Grateful Dead Can Teach Us About Cloud Economics. In addition to IDC’s usual carefully researched data, the webinar included a wealth of thought-provoking information that used analogies from the band’s storied history and […]
Writing Guaranteed Press Releases
by Deb McAlister-Holland Long ago, in an office less than three miles from the one I am in today, I wrote my first press release on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The goal was simple: to persuade a reporter (radio, TV, or print) to take one or more of the sentences in the press release and include it […]
Measuring Earned Media vs. Paid Media
The newest buzz word for engaging current and prospective customers through social media is earned media. It’s measured with the same metrics as traditional paid media (advertising, press releases, telemarketing, direct mail, and email marketing): impressions/audience size, lifts in brand awareness, message awareness, and purchase intent. Quantifying the value of earned media has moved up […]
Managing Customer Service & Employee Privacy
After the LIMRA Social Media Conference in Cambridge, MA a few weeks ago, one of the attendees who downloaded the presentation deck used for the Customer Service Meets Social Media panel posted this question: “One of the points made in this panel is that front-line employees are often recorded (audio and video) and the results […]
What Employers Want When Hiring Social Media Talent
Peter Shankman, founder of HARO (Help a Reporter Out), a service that links bloggers, journalists, and content producers (video, audio, digital, print) with expert sources, has said, “Don’t hire a social media expert. It’s like a deli hiring someone who’s an expert in taking the bread out of the freezer. Unless they can also make a […]
Email Evolution: New Trends in a Proven Marketing Communications Channel
By Deb McAlister-Holland For nearly 3 decades, I’ve had an email marketing campaign of some kind running every business day. Yes, there was email 30 years ago. In fact, email is 40 years old. Back when I sent my first few campaigns, there wasn’t a lot of commercial email being sent. I worked for a […]
What to Do When Customer Service Meets Social Media: 5 Basic Lessons
In June 1984, the first online customer support forum for computer users sponsored by a computer maker opened its virtual doors on CompuServe on a Tuesday morning. Around noon on Thursday, the volume of inquiries was running about five times what the company planners had projected, and by the end of the day on Friday, […]
Defining Measurable Value for Multi-Channel Marketing Automation
Guest Blog By David Potter, Vice President, Professional Services, Distribion, Inc. One of the basic assumptions this blog makes is that its readers are marketers who are interested in improving their multi-channel marketing results through almost any means possible. Another is that there is a place for technology in almost any distributed marketing organization – […]
New Multi-Channel Marketing Priorities
In July, The Distributed Marketing Blog completed its first survey of marketing executives. We asked about their current spending priorities, spending plans for 2012, their view of how effective various marketing channels were, and how they selected different marketing communications tools. So far, we’ve published three sets of data tables that detailed some of the […]