Cartoon credit: Australian cartoonist Grea offers this and other royalty-free cartoons on her website.
- Tweet Success = Right Tweet, Right Time – Social Media Today posted an excellent blog post this week on the best post times for various kinds of social media. The blog said that posting to Twitter at noon, 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. midweek and on weekends was optimal. For Facebook, Saturday morning is the optimal time for any post, although those posted around noon also get more traffic. As for blogs, Monday morning is the best time. The lesson for marketers: Social media (like email) has become a kind of adult homework. The optimal times match the times when busy professionals have a few minutes to browse the web and catch up on things they just don’t have time for during the workday. For more details on this, check out the presentation from a recent webinar sponsored by insurance trade association LIMRA. You can download it here or watch the recording here. The lesson for marketers: Scheduling your social media posts can increase results – and repeating Tweets helps, too. It’s easy to test your own audience’s reaction to posts made at different times of day to find the optimal time for your content.
- Plagiarism Today: RSS Scraping — Jonathan Bailey’s plagiarism Today broadcasts and blogs on the subject of plagiarism are always both educational and entertaining. This week his plagiarism Today blog published a look at RSS scraping – that is, the practice by some bottom-feeding marketers of subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed, and then republishing content without permission. They do it for one reason: the original content creator has put together great content rich in heavily searched keywords, and they’re too lazy or inept to do it themselves. Jonathan explains the problem and the legal issues surrounding the practice, along with the many reasons that so few copyright holders fight back. He also offers a simple solution that any marketer can add to their blog or content feed in seconds. The lesson for marketers: You may not have the resources to fight back against the content thieves legally, but there are tools you can use that will discourage the more blatant and damaging reuse of your content to steal search engine traffic that you’ve earned with your careful SEO planning and writing.
- Live tweeting becomes a fixture of corporate earnings – According to the IR Web Report, more than 50 public companies tweeted their Q2 earnings announcements live, while hundreds more provide live links to information as it becomes available. The report explains how the process works, when it adds value, and when it annoys investors. The lesson for marketers: Compliance rules and investor expectations are changing, and so are the once-staid earnings announcements. The post-Enron and Madoff buzzword for investors is transparency: the more information they have about a company, and the sooner they have it, and the more trust they have in the company, the better. This article offers excellent lessons on how to add value to an IR program with social media, along with some equally valuable “don’ts”.
- That’s my name – don’t wear it out! – U.K. marketing guru Gurdev Singh penned an interesting article for the MediaTel Newsline this week in which he argues that the success of multi-channel marketing is in danger because marketers don’t know when to quit. Like the school-yard taunt thrown at would-be playmates who annoy others by constantly trying to get their attention, he argues that marketers risk alienating consumers by hitting them too often – and risk losing market share if they don’t recognize that consumers have become “multi-tasking, communication addicts” who don’t pay sufficient attention to one channel for any marketing message to penetrate through single-channel messages. The lesson for marketers: Harness the power of personalized multi-channel marketing – but don’t overdo it. Pay attention to customer reactions to the quantity and timing of your messages, and use your analytics reports to identify the right number of messages, the right number of channels, and the best time to persuade your targets without annoying them. It’s a balancing act, but it pays off.
- Made-to-Order Marketing Works – Chief!Marketer this week reported on the results of its survey showing that one-to-one marketing isn’t just the buzz phrase it was for many years. It’s a viable, useful tactic that works. Like our own survey, marketers who participated in the survey reported on in the blog said that email was the most effective tool they had for personalizing and delivering effective messages to individual customers, followed by direct mail, web, social media, and mobile. The lesson for marketers: We don’t need to be magpies, jumping from one marketing tool to the next shiny new tool that promises better results, but we do need to pay attention to what our peers (and our competitors) are doing. Why? Because people who become accustomed to something they like begin to expect it from others. And as more and more marketers hone their skills in personalization and customization, the rest need to follow. And that probably means adjusting both processes (automation tools, planning, targeting, customer intelligence) and messages (copywriting, timing, calls to action).