What the heck is M 2.0?

If you were to open a business, you need to let people know that you are in business. In the “good ole days” all you did was call the phone company and you were in the book. Some people went the extra mile and registered with the Better Business Bureau, hosted a grand opening or did a little advertising. These still apply but given the challenges and opportunities today, it’s fascinating what David can accomplish with all the Goliaths out there.

Here are a few (Web 2.0) things to consider to enhance your presence:
1. Your website – This is your imprint for the online world and an absolute to let people find you. Keep it simple and current, and try to engage people – but don't stop there.

2. Your email list – Ask people to sign up, ask them for preferences, communicate with them on a regular basis. Overstock.com, Paul Fredrick Menstyle and King Arthur Flour are three companies that do an outstanding job in getting people to sign up.

3. Your blog – Keep this current; incorporate customer feedback, product information, testimonials, email campaign information and editorials – all written with a passion to keep users engaged. The Craving Anthropologie blog is a masterpiece; Stave Puzzles and Duncraft also have great special interest blogs. An up-and-comer in this space is the blog of 1154 LILL Studio’s.

4. Your MySpace & Facebook Page – Set up an online profile about your company, feature key people within your company. If you are a financial institution – feature your reps, if you are a consumer products company – feature some of the personas that you market to, if you are a B2B company – feature the difference you are making in society, if you are selling a city – market it and so on. This is how the new generation will find you, and we better learn to be connected.

5. Twitter – Remember the Dell Dude? People enjoyed looking for him – now people track their favorites on Twitter – just remember to keep it brief.

6. Flickr a little – Why not put images up so people can find them, if people can see a delicious desert on Facebook with a note that it was put together with the finest ingredients from King Arthur Flour – odds are they will visit the site to learn a little more.

7. YouTube is cool – This weekend, we enjoyed watching two hours worth of clips with the kids – all different kinds of videos. A couple of months ago Britton’s of Columbia posted a video on how to tie a bow tie; the Masai shoe is so aptly displayed in a video from Herrington Catalog (part of their site). Of course you may have already heard the story of BlendTec. The point is that we should look for ways to engage the user through infomercials, as well as testimonial videos – linking all of it back.

8. Surveys are vital – we always want to know what our customers are thinking and how we can help them even more. Design Toscano does a great job in engaging their users for feedback. The key point is that you should always look for reasons to ask questions and try to leverage this information for future communiqués.

9. Podcasts are effective too – Why not record customer testimonials and play them on your site. Same thing for a bank – have someone provide a daily update on the rates and the market performance, trends, etc. Set these up on your site so people can come and be entertained as well as engaged.

10. Mashups are good way to integrate – think of it as a site cocktail, for instance you can combine mapping sites (Google or Yahoo!) and overlay apartment listings or traffic information. There are a couple sites that make it possible – visit Popfly or Yahoo! Pipes

So how do you use these Web 2.0 techniques? Yogis define M2.0 as new era marketing, in a recent seminar on M2.0 in Woodstock, VT, Reagan Taylor defined M2.0 as a strategy and tactics that leverage Web 2.0 technologies. The beauty of M2.0 according to Taylor is that all of this can be done on a minimum budget. Look for future seminars on M2.0 – we’re planning on in Atlanta soon.

New Tools, Old Yard Stick

My pal Heather has released a new article in Computerworld regarding Web 2.0 techniques and the IT Staffers who seek to justify there use.

In her article, Heather sites a Forrester Report that stated 63% (of 275 IT managers surveyed) were still using traditional ROI benchmark – i.e. total cost of ownership, to measure the value of Web 2.0 tools. Unfortunately, the new techniques don’t exactly lend themselves to these old standards; most Web 2.0 channels are focused on the improved exchange of information something that is difficult to quantify. Judge for yourself and see how companies across the country are faced with this welcomed challenge.

Let’s get Together… yeah, yeah, yeah

Kudos to my new friend (who I’ve never met) Heather Havenstein, she always manages to report on just the right topics when I’m in need of a Yogi Blog. Today for instance, her PC World article focuses on breathing life into your address book using Pulse from Plaxo Inc.

Pulse is a social network that allows users to integrate people feeds via their electronic address book. Using Pulse, members can selectively share portions of themselves – for example, your parents could get a feed with your Amazon.com wish list but not the pictures you took at your New Year’s Eve (that lasted well into ’07) Party – unless they were there too.

Pulse is designed to naturally integrate with traditional and social sites; the beauty of the design is that you don’t have to subscribe to all of the services to be informed – Pulse serves as the medium to convey your information from MySpace, Amazon etc.

So thanks Heather, hopefully the Yogi Blog will help your search numbers; and, if we start a Yogi Pulse, we’ll be sure to refer readership!

Only in L.A.

A couple weeks back I wrote about the LAPD accepting inbound text messages in their 911 system, well that’s just the tip of the clichéd iceberg.

ComputerWorld posted an article on Friday about the use of Twitter by the LA Fire Department; they are using this Web 2.0 technology to broadcast information on fires or other emergencies to users who have subscribed. Their use of this medium is based on our wireless world – not everyone is looking at their computer screen 24 x 7, but (if like me) have their cell/ PDA etc. within arm’s reach at all times.

In addition to the use of Twitter, the LAFD is investigating the use of some 80 other Web 2.0 technologies – we’re staying tuned…

Connected?

I recently saw an article about the worst customer service departments; I used three of the top ten and my cell provider was listed as the top offender.

I know that everyone has had a poor customer service experience at some point; I have had my share of late – that very cell provider, an online clothier and an airline all in the last six months. Outside of the huge amount of hold time, my greatest complaint had to do with lack of integration. In each instance, the “send an email” feature never connected with my profile, I never got a response and my email (the first contact) couldn’t be accessed by the CSR when I called to follow up. This is three different companies/ industries!

All that in mind, I was pleasantly surprised when I made a call at lunch today to enroll in our employee stock plan – I tried to enroll online, but kept getting an error. So I naturally waited two days, and reluctantly called into the customer service department today expecting a hassle. I was completely wrong, the CSR addressed me by name (I had entered my SSN) and knew that I had tried to enroll online Tuesday evening. He helped with my elections and even provided information that wasn’t given in my original notice.

So what makes this experience so different? CONNECTIVITY – knowing that your customers/ prospects have logged in, attempted to access your product or service and then helping them correct the issue.

So I ask, at what point in the bell curve does the cost/ time of updating/ integrating your multiple channels offset the attrition of customer dissatisfaction?

t:-:t 20%! (TRANSLATION: Text Rocks!)

Ever heard of leet? Simply defined, it’s internet/ text messaging slang and it’s catching on (more later).

Text messaging is everywhere, and is now expanding to include 911 response systems in LA and New York; the LA Times carried the announcement from the LAPD and their focus to have some pilot program (accepting text, photo and video) operational by the end of the year. Michael Bloomberg announced a similar program for New York this past January.

So how does this change things for eMarketers? Odds are that customers will soon demand SMS/ Text messaging – or it’s replacement. Outside of younger cell users, the text environment hasn’t been as popular in the US as overseas. These recently announced upgrades and the use among today’s US teens could change the face of eMarketing.

In addition to the medium, there could be a variation on the language. Leet has evolved to create privacy and speed texting – one way to determine its popularity is to talk to your average 16-year old; my cousin sends me the strangest messages (email and text). They make me crazy – partly, because I have a Journalism degree, but mostly because I need a translator! The worst part is that there is no set Leet dictionary, users can use multiple character options/ combinations OR make their own alphabet. Get ready, this will soon be the group creating our commercials!

Find more about leet-speek on Wikipedia or my handy reference, the Urban Dictionary.

Are you one in a Million?

You knew it was only a matter of time before someone on the blog brought up the iPhone topic – it’s all over the TV and web and projected to be EVERYWHERE by the end of the day tomorrow. There are estimates for 200,000 sales in the first two days, and one million by the end of their third quarter (ending Sept. 30).

But what does this mean for eMarketers? Will websites change now that the view size/ screen size is so much smaller? Will the “above the fold” now be equivalent to a postage stamp? Or we will simply make a second set of rules/ preferences now that alternate viewing is becoming more widespread?

Now I know there are many nay-sayers out there who will object and refer to the status-quo following the introduction of Blackberry and Trio phones; but is it the same? I know many people with crack-berries who cannot stop themselves from being awed by the Apple advertising – these are the ones not in the Apple cult-like following.

Assuming that Apple reaches their projections – stock shares have gained 43% they sold 381,000 iPods in the first year (October 2001 debut) – other phone companies will be scrambling to upgrade existing models or create a competitive product. At that point, our everyday practices could quickly become obsolete.

Should’ve been ME!

Ever seen The Italian Job – the new one, where Seth Green’s character is convinced that the idea for Napster was stolen from him, while napping… it was on this weekend and it reminded me of a conversation I had with a colleague of mine (you’ll see his name on this blog). He was commenting about how he wished he had come up with YouTube. He’s not alone – PC World recently published an article about the Top 25 Sites to Watch, the list includes Mashups, social networking sites and even Blog-protection. Here are some of the entries that I found most interesting:

Mashup Sites
For the unfamiliar, Mashups allow you to create your own site cocktail, for instance you can take a mapping site (like Google or Yahoo!) and overlay apartment listings or traffic information. Imagine apartment hunting from your living room or finding a great beach house months before going on vacation; sites like Popfly and Yahoo Pipes make this possible.

Social Networking
A new social networking site seems to crop-up everyday; the list includes a few of the front-runners in the category, including trivia sites, like BuzzDash that facilitate opinion polls; CircleUp and MyPunchbowl that allow you to coordinate events including carpools and parties. There’s even a service that protects your blog – BlogBackupOnline, a little safety-net that captures everything to restore if there’s a mishap or allow you to transport your blog to another service.

Check out Preston Gralla’s full listing of the 25 Sites to Watch.

What was that I heard? A Twitter?

Twitter is the social networking/micro-blogging site that asks the question "what are you doing?" Members are allowed to post messages of up to 140 characters long to answer that question, and keep tabs on the friends they've added to their account. When ever a friend updates, you can see it on the site, or choose to receive an SMS message to your mobile device.

To eMarketers, the appeal should be pretty simple. Consumers can add your Twitter site to their list of friends, and keep tabs of whatever updates or special offers you have to send out. This is another very compelling and engaging way to communicate with your customers. They are actively opted in to your messages as a friend, so they want to hear what you have to say.

As with all forms of marketing, but especially social networks like this, one has to be careful not to inundate consumers with marketing messages. If you're sending a sales pitch to your customers ever hour, they'll quickly get tired of your messages, and block you out. However, if you can provide useful information, with the occasional promo mixed in, at an acceptable frequency to your consumers, then there is much potential for success.

Some organizations are already taking advantage of this young app. Here are some samples:

Barack Obama
Dell Outlet
Portland Trailblazers

Note the nature of the special offers on the Dell Outlet Twitter page - special offers that are only good for 25 minutes! This company is doing an excellent job of leveraging the instant nature of the network to provide the most benefit for customers, as well as keeping the offer limited to a select few.

As a question to readers - has anyone here tried to leverage Twitter for their marketing, or thought about it?

Take your email on Safari

Apple has released a beta version of it's Safari browser for PC. Safari was exclusive to Apple up until this release. What does this mean to you as an email marketer?

Safari's usage share has grown from 1.89% to 2.94% in the past year, which might not seem like much, but now that it's open to use on PC, there is a potential that more users will be on the browser in the coming months, especially with how well the browser integrates with Apple's other popular applications like iTunes.

Initial reports have seen somechanges in formating and fonts styles in Safari, but not anything to be overly alarmed about. But, it's a good idea now for email marketers to look at how their emails as well as their website will render in this new browser, before they hear about it from their customers.

You can download Safari for PC for free here.

Leveraging Video for Email

With the rise in popularity of YouTube and other online video sites, marketers are trying to figure out how to leverage this new channel. One of the challenges is how do you get people to see your video? Since YouTube allows you to embed video into a page, many might think you could embed the video into an email. However, if you do that, the email would most likely get blocked by ISPs, as they flag email content with things like video embedded in them as a virus.

One of the best solutions I've seen is to put that familiar YouTube video box in your email, and when the user clicks on it, it takes them to a landing page where they can view it. Here are a couple of sample emails from The Oakland Raiders and Beyonce of this method.