To quote our friends at Lyris, “In the online marketing world, email is considered a medium with broad reach – everyone has an email address, and everyone receives marketing messages in their inbox. But, globally, mobile texting has twice as many active users as email. Mobile texting – also known as short message service, or SMS – is a vehicle for online marketers that provides an even broader reach.”

Having launched several mobile marketing campaigns for our clients, we’ve learned the hard way that before you leap into execution mode, there are some important steps to consider first.

Here’s our top 7:

1. Strategize.
First ask yourself, why do you want to use mobile marketing? Without jumping on a bandwagon, does it make sense for your products/solutions/market? If yes, then what will be considered a success? Building a marketing database, creating dialogues with your customers, sending relevant & timely campaigns..?

2. Allocate a budget.
Strategy is important, but if you don’t have the budget to execute, then your goals will most likely not be met. If your mobile budget does not yet exist, consider re-distributing a line item in your existing budget as a first pass.

3. Integrate mobile in your mix.
Infuse your other existing media channels with your mobile call to action, for cross-marketing purposes. Not only does it complement your marketing efforts, but it maximizes brand interaction and utilization.

4. Get short code help.
There are service providers out there who specialize in working with aggregators  to obtain carrier certification and provisioning needs. It’s a long and complicated process, that is best left to the experts. Here are two that we’ve worked with and recommend: in the US, Lyris and in Canada, ZipStripe.

5. Plan your campaigns.
Once you have worked out the short code and keyword details of your mobile marketing campaign (see above), it’s time to design a campaign that includes something of value to the audience, therefore encouraging participation. Ensure relevance and timeliness of the offer, keep it simple and think about the ease of use. 

6. Test before you send.
Most ESPs offer an email or text rendering tool to preview your campaign before you send it out. Be sure to try it out with as many mobile devices as possible, to avoid technical glitches and frustrating your audience.

7. Have customer service at the ready.
Mobile marketing is subject to its own set of rules and regulations, especially in the short code provisioning space. Make sure you include a toll-free number, email address and a URL for terms and conditions to support your campaign. A lack of customer support can kill even the best mobile campaigns.

If you are just beginning to think about your mobile marketing strategy, check out the 2009 MMA Global Awards for some inspiration and ideas.

Got a great mobile campaign to share? Send us the link!

Facebook is becoming known for making sudden changes to its website and later facing heat from its users. This time around, Facebook has announced new features designed to unlock more of the data accumulated about its users during its six-year history and is now sharing personal profile information with third parties, without consent.

For now, it’s just a few web sites, such as the music site Pandora, and the consumer review site, Yelp. Among other things, Facebook is using apps to connect with other websites so people can communicate their interests with friends, colleagues and acquaintances online. In addition, Facebook also adjusted its own website to create more pages where users’ biographical information could be exposed to a wider audience.

So if you don’t want to share, you have to opt out to prevent your information from appearing.

How to do it?

Opting out of Facebook’s new profile sharing is a multiple step process:

STEP 1: Go to the “Privacy Settings.” Go to “Applications and Web Sites.” Then go to “Instant Personalization Pilot Program,” and select edit settings.

STEP 2: For all users there’s an automatic check in the box below, which allows Facebook to share your information with other web sites. You are automatically “opted in.” If you do not wish to share this information, uncheck the box.

STEP 3: Even after you’ve done this, it is not clear whether you need to “opt out” at the sites where Facebook is intending to share your information, like Pandora and Yelp, and soon many more sites. You need to look at the upper left hand corner of those sites to see whether those sites are recognizing your Facebook account and activity. Once again, you need to opt out.

But a word of caution, as Facebook concedes, your information may still be shared through your friends’ accounts, unless you block the application from these web sites. In an apparent response to U.S. Congressional pressure, Facebook has already made some changes to this “Instant Personalization Pilot Program,” so you may want to check back in once in a while to monitor your settings.

At the end of the day, Facebook is a business and their quickest route to revenue is through selling user information.

While historically, Facebook users have remained loyal regardless of changes made to the social network, the time may now have come to decide whether you want to allow social networks to reveal your private details in public forums.

So, what do you think..? Do you care if Facebook or other social media outlets share your information..?

Whether you are marketing in B2C or B2B, LinkedIn has a goldmine of marketing opportunities that are (basically) free.
When you Google “Using LinkedIn for marketing”, there are over 3 million results on the topic. While most users are familiar with the basics of LinkedIn, there are some lesser-known tools that may contribute to positioning you as a thought leader in your space.

Put your profile to work.
Your profile is the most-viewed aspect of your presence on LinkedIn, so take the time to optimize it to your advantage.
1. Include a photo. Be mindful of the term “social” in social media. A professional-looking photo puts a face to your personal brand.
2. Hyperlink using keywords. Instead of using the default “My Blog” option that LinkedIn provides, use an SEO-friendly title such as the example below.

3. Use keywords in descriptions. Whenever possible, use keywords (ex. below) in your summaries and descriptions, which will contribute to your SEO ranking.

4. Keep an active status. Leverage the status update within your profile to share insight, solicit help or announce events/achievements. These will appear in your contact’s homepage and extend out to your entire network.

Employ third-party applications.
There is a multitude of third-party apps that help to build out your personal or business profile online.
1. Got a great slide deck? Get it online with SlideShare and anyone who views your profile can access your slides to understand your value offering. Additionally, slides can be tagged with keywords to optimize SEO rankings.
2. Blogging? Sync your latest blog post with your profile using WordPress or BlogLink, so your network can immediately access your latest thought leadership piece.
3. Hitting the road? Use My Travel/TripIt to let your network know where you’ll be, to facilitate meetings or in-person opps for networking.
4. Speaking or presenting? Use Events to inform your network of upcoming events that you’re attending.
5. Tweeting? You can now push your Twitter posts to LinkedIn, but proceed with caution. Consider that LinkedIn is a professional environment, meant to be used for proper business purposes. Best practice: when tweeting, use the hashtag #in to promote business-relevant posts to your LinkedIn profile. Your professional network doesn’t need to know that you’re at the pub having drinks with @yourfriend at 3pm!

Start your own group.
By creating a group for your brand, you’ll be able to maximize reach beyond your network. Within the brand group, you can start discussions, share news, post jobs and create subgroups.
Take it a step further and create an “unbranded” group that is not directly affiliated with your business, but focuses on the space in which you play. The unbranded approach enables you to own the high level space, via collaboration of thousands of practitioners, while driving conversations that take place within the groups. The discussions taking place within your groups can deliver invaluable opinions, testimonials and thought leadership content to power your marketing programs.
Example: Arketi Group’s unbranded “BtoB Marketing” group

Use the staying power of Group Discussions to initiate conversations with industry decision makers while driving focused traffic to your company website or blog. Use your company’s blog posts as linkable content and post in multiple (relevant) groups regularly. Maintaining a consistent presence will lend to the credibility of you/your company as an authority on the subject/discussion.

Two tips for extra punch.
1. Edit your public Profile’s URL to reflect your name or tagline.

2. Then put it to work by adding it to your blog, linking to it from your website, and including it in your email signature.

Parting thoughts.
Your reputation on LinkedIn is deemed more important/serious than other SM sites such as Twitter or Facebook, simply because you cannot hide behind an alias. The transparency of using your real name, real title and real brand forces you to  check your posts, conversations and content for relevance and legitimacy. So before you start a rant within a group discussion or leave comments that may be deemed brand-erosive, take a moment to consider how it reflects.

Over to you….we’d love to learn about your LinkedIn marketing success. Would you like to share your stories?

As I sat in the chair at my hair salon the other day, I thought—man, this has GOT to be the lowest tech place that I frequent, yet I return religiously, every two months, and plunk down $150 for my color and trim. They don’t ping my smartphone with appointment reminders, or tweet out promotions but somehow I manage to make each appointment and continue to pay full pop for their various products on offer.

This salon is really old school, technology-wise. Everything runs manually in the business, from a hardcopy appointment book, to no apparent technology onsite, save for their high end hair straighteners. They don’t have any online presence (yet), run any loyalty programs or execute “lead gen” programs. Yet every time I visit, the salon is busy with (mostly) women in the 25-45 demographic and the clientele knows full well to book ahead to ensure their spot.

So as I sat for 45 minutes waiting to emerge once again as a “natural” blonde, I thought—what makes the difference? For this particular business, it boils down to a kickass stylist who gets my color right every time and I can relax, knowing that I’m in good hands. For most women, that is a huge contributor to the loyalty factor. They also offer nice onsite perks, such as lattes, Pellegrino and free product samples. And, after five years, I now feel like I’m going to hang out with friends, rather than just conducting a transaction of services.

Yet, every time I visit, the marketer in me screams…LOST OPPORTUNITIES! I keep thinking about how they could be growing their client base, increasing their repeat visits and cross pollinating their service offering to other stylists and clients via social media, email marketing and loyalty programs. Perhaps they don’t need to grow their business. They appear to be fully booked on a consistent basis and even with the economic downturn last year, they seemed to buzz along at full steam.

Overall, there are some businesses that I expect to fight harder for my loyalty. If they don’t offer email discounts, monthly promos or basic loyalty programs, I am shocked. For the most part, I will go out of my way to support those businesses who do connect with me in my preferred high tech/touch manner.

So is it just me? Just the fact that I work to help businesses build loyalty, extend their reach and build their brand and therefore I expect it?

Or is it you too?

Do you continue to support low tech businesses when they don’t connect with your high “tech-spectations”?

At the time, I thought, hmmmm, ok—I hadn’t ever considered that approach and perhaps this could be an interesting experiment. Well, what my experience with that client taught me (and I really knew at the beginning but had thrown caution to the wind) is that yes, strategy matters. In the sense that when there is NO corporate strategy, direction or PLAN— of where the company is heading, of mapping the product/service roadmap to the market demands or paying close attention to the competitive landscape. When all of these elements are ignored– what happens is this—NOTHING.

Time is the killer of all deals and that applies not only to one-off sales opps, but also to a company’s evolution. The absence of strategic vision and execution results in an executive team that is spinning its wheels and groups within the company that are disjointed and ineffective. This is especially critical for early stage companies competing in a noisy space. When time is of the essence and runways are short—there is nothing worse than deliverables missed, deadlines passed and objectives unmet.

Corporate strategy doesn’t have to be a huge, all-encompassing, static “thing”. It can be as simple as stating, “ we want to deliver the best {insert widget here} that we can with the resources in place, and we want it completed by March 1^st.” And then sticking to it.

There is also the element of reality that needs to be considered. I can’t tell you how many times I have consulted with clients who make statements along the lines of: “we need to out-market our competition—we need to be better than those guys”. So my follow up question is, “are you better than those guys?”. If the answer is NO, then you’d better have some deep pockets for marketing to blow the doors off the “other guys”. So when the answer is, “well we don’t really have a lot of money to spend and we’re not sure what our message is”—that’s where the wheels come off the bus.

Strategy planning and mapping deliverables to corporate objectives isn’t always fun..in fact, it’s usually kind of painful and time-consuming. But, it is truly core to the success of any business.

Whether you are a micro-business just starting out or a legacy enterprise company—you can’t get to your destination without first determining how you are getting there. For some reason, it’s the critical component that many companies want to skip. Instead, the focus turns to tactical one-offs distributed across mediums, that have the collective result of “not much”.

So when someone asks you what the corporate strategy is and the blank stares around the table echo the fact that there isn’t one—STOP.

Take the time– communicate, evaluate, plan and execute.

There were several sessions ongoing throughout the day, designed to help energize attendees and equip them with information and tools they can immediately implement to improve their businesses.
Our particular session focused on “Clearing the Muddy Waters in Marketing, Communications and Social Media”. With a great panel moderated by Kathryn Schwab and including Kneale Mann, Jim Donnelly, Arash Mahin and me—we addressed many of the biggest marketing challenges facing SMBs today.

We based the presentation and session highlights around the fact that there is a lot of noise in the “marketers marketplace” today. We stressed that SMBs (or any sized business for that matter) should look beyond the trends and focus on what makes sense for their respective business.

If you couldn’t make the summit, you can access the session deck here, to review the content.

Following a great Q&A session and lots of interaction with attendees afterwards, here are my top five takeaways from the day:
• There is NO magic bullet when it comes to marketing. Everyone wishes there were, but there just isn’t.
• Social media may make sense for your business, or it may not. It depends on your market, product/service and customers.
• “Old school” marketing vehicles like radio and print are NOT dead. They can be part of a holistic approach to your overall marketing programs, IF it is a legitimate way for you to reach your customers/targets.
• Social media strategy can be likened to basic human growth. You establish your presence, start learning, listening, growing and then you become a contributor, thought leader and teacher.
•  There is no point in asking what the ROI is with regards to different marketing vehicles, if you haven’t tried any of them. It depends entirely on your business, who your customers are the execution of the programs. 

At the end of the day, success depends on a good strategy, blended with a holistic approach to your marketing programs—while being mindful of your human and budgetary resources. You can have the best plan in the world, but if there is no one to execute it, and no funding—it’s a non-starter.

We are planning a follow up bootcamp, to expand further on the various topics. Interested in learning more?

I tore the envelope open in anticipation of planning my new Spring palette, with at least a ten percent discount to ease the sting of credit card abuse.
Sadly, anticipation did not translate to delight, as the elaborate fold-out glossy simply featured a photo layout of the colour schemes for Spring. Various models were depicted with the seasonal looks and there was a complete #fail with no personalization, no call to action, incentive or invitation on offer.

I can only imagine that HBC and MAC produced in excess of fifty thousand such pieces that will probably result in an immediate blue box recycling rate north of 90%.
The lost opportunity here is huge. I am sure that both HBC and MAC have my email address. They certainly should know what products I have purchased in the past and can predict what I will buy this season, if they are tracking user behaviour at all.

The point being, if they want to remain front and center with their target audience, they should commit to a year-round, sustained effort comprised of multiple tactics, potentially including direct mailers as part of the marketing mix.

At the very least, the direct mail piece should have a call to action or incentive that is tied to the other elements within their marketing programs.
Integration is key. Every direct mail campaign should be part of an overall integrated strategy. This means that brands should be combining highly targeted direct mail pieces, (usually a series), with email versions of the pieces so that e-marketing is done in tandem with each direct mail drop.
They should incorporate valuable, worthwhile calls-to-action into all direct mail campaigns and drive recipients to either a landing page or microsite armed with back-end analytics to enable measurement and management of lead conversions.
As a standalone or one-off, this type of campaign accomplishes nothing. While it may hold visual appeal, it does not impart any customer engagement or encourage loyalty, it is not measurable and it sure as heck was not worth whatever they paid their creative agency to produce.

Here’s how the campaign could have been truly successful:

• Pair the direct mail piece with an email campaign, inviting me to the HBC/Mac custom landing page, where I could register for my “personalized” discount
• While I am retrieving my discount, ask me a few questions about the products I buy, the ones I don’t and perhaps some details about my subscriber preferences
• Provide an incentive to visit my nearest location and if I bring in the direct mail piece, I will receive a small gift with purchase (minimum $50)
• Oh yeah, don’t forget to leverage social media to further engage with me

Now tell me, what loyal customer would NOT take those offers?
Kill two birds. Make your customers happy and accomplish your marketing objectives.
Done and done.

The key to working with a limited marketing budget is to focus on just a few activities – and do them well. While businesses are holding out hope for the power of Web 2.0 technologies to deliver, the fact is, more traditional marketing programs continued to provide the best results in 2009. Programs like email campaigns, advertising, and events were able to deliver the goods in the form of better lead generation and conversion rates than some of the newer methods, including the social Web. But the problem remains: which marketing methods will continue to earn their keep this year, and which ones will emerge as new winners, providing the measureable results you’re seeking?

Here are 10 reasons I think customer reference programs should make the cut, and even lead your marketing agenda this year. I may be biased because customer reference is my thing. But I believe that, with just a bit of focus and effort, customer reference activities can add substance to other elements of your marketing plan (like demand gen or lead gen activities), and may even help you get that social Web program off the ground.

Download our latest top 10 guide to learn more about why you should include customer advocacy in your mix for 2010.

We’d love to hear your feedback on what’s working in your customer reference programs this year..!

I’m excited to be speaking on a panel with Kathryn Schwab of PRceptive Communications, Kneale Mann of YouIntegrate, Arash Mahin of vdoLife and Jim Donnelly of the Ottawa Business Journal. There is nothing like collaboration and we each bring different perspectives on the practical approaches to marketing and communications in the age of changing traditional media, the shifting landscape of new media and the muddy waters of social media.

We’ll discuss how business owners and managers should map marketing communications strategies to business objectives, choose the right tools to hit the right audience/customer, and look beyond the “band wagon” mistakes that many businesses are making. We offer valuable insights about traditional media relations and how it’s changed, why video is one of the fastest growing areas in marketing and what integrated marketing and social media really mean for SMBs.

So whether you are just starting a business or are an experienced marketer seeking different perspectives from a team who’s “been there, done that”—there promises to be some valuable takeaways that you can implement in your business right away.

Join us for this powerful one day event to gain a wealth of knowledge and feedback, direction and inspiration from keynote speakers and workshop experts that you don’t want to miss.

Closer to the event, we will post the Twitter #hashtags for the summit and be sure to tweet your thoughts/opinions/comments. We’d love to hear your feedback…!

This way, you can ensure that you are offering up fresh content that resonates with your subscribers, therefore contributing to increased engagement and better performing campaigns.

So, to steal a line from Beyonce, put a ring on it this year and get engaged with your audience–they will reward you.