For any of you that will or will not admit to answering email, tweeting, or texting while in the WC, might relate to this excerpt from The Colbert Report. Social media brings new meaning to the WORD ubiquity.
Give Away the Store?
Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor in chief, follows a trend in media these days whereby media no longer interviews an expert, but becomes the expert. Despite this I still tuned in yesterday for a synopsis of his new book “Free” which you can relive here.
As heavy users of 37signals products we’ve been on the consumer end of a freemium business model. We first signed up for free Highrise and free Basecamp. We experimented with free BackPack before dropping it at no cost. Now we pay for Highrise and Basecamp as do several hundred thousand others at about $50 a month. Read more about this business approach here.
But what about the services industry…
Without software or packaged goods to sell what do we give away for free. Would you, our customer, commit to spending dollars or euros with us down the road after we give you “X”. Other than this blog and a couple tweets per day we don’t really have freebies out there. To be honest, I’m not sure we have a clue. Can the freemium business model work in the services industry? What should we give away?
Any advice? via Comment or Twitter @wefightboredom
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Eliminate the middle man
If you already use Wufoo and Highrise you know that form submits go directly from one to the other. If both are new to you I encourage you to check out this Wufoo blog post and learn more about sending form data into the Highrise CRM.
We offer our clients the ability to do the same into Highrise, Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM, so you can eliminate the manual labor and use that intern for something a little more productive. Your intern will thank you. Trust me.
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The Fun Theory
VW’s campaign in 2009 might be a bit dated, but it lives on in viral form here and elsewhere on the web. You can see all three experiments at TheFunTheory.com. Here’s our favorite. This leaves no doubt that fun trumps dull and boring. Enjoy.
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Help Wanted
How do we sell ourselves (interactive shops) to potential new employees? If you’re pouring over RFP responses or shopping for a new ad agency keep in mind that these new hires will build brands, execute marketing campaigns and help drive demand for countless companies. We’ve been fortune and never really felt the need to advertise for to bring in new people. Others aren’t so lucky. Would you work here?
We have over 800 budget conscious, retail bleeding, merchandise loving, sofa sleeping, car driving, pizza eating, market activating, comp sales crazy, ROI focused team members in many offices around the country! –Zimmerman
We fuse media, creative, strategy and technology to achieve brave, accountable marketing solutions. –Moxie
Our relentless focus on client service leads to groundbreaking work and outstanding results. And fun permeates everything we do - from weekly happy hours at our in-house Beer Bar, to friendly Wii competitions in our Game Lounge and annual all-agency outings like 360i’s Amazing Race or Beach Olympics. –360i
You eat, breathe, and dream not just about design—but interactive design. You’re a bit of a technology geek, too. Good news is we’d love to talk to you. –Partner & Napier
It’s only fair that we include our simple, short blurb.
We fight boredom! –VLG
We also eat, dream, focus, drink, drive cars (not after drinking) and have fun.
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Good vs. Bad
Over the years we know only a handful of things to be true 99% of the time. One is that the more people empowered to make suggestions that “have” to be included in a website the worse that website becomes.
A good analogy and example of bad is your t.v. remote control. Just because it has room for 100 buttons doesn’t mean it has to have 100 buttons. Keep the message simple. Keep the site clean and navigable.
Think about a remote with 10 buttons. What would you keep and what would you throw away?
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7.5 Hours Per Day
That’s how much time today’s 8- to 18-year old spends in front of a t.v., computer, mobile phone, and/or iPod each day. Thirty years ago that same demographic spent 1.5 hours in front of digital media each day, but that’s probably just because we didn’t have very much digital media. Bad or good this is a trend unlikely to reverse itself.
How will this change how you target these up-and-comers? Almost 8 hours of digital leaves very little room for print media, so that’s out. Tech savvy children won’t know what it’s like to sit through t.v. commercials. Heck, what’s a t.v.? Facebook ads, PPC, iPhone app banners, and other ad delivery vehicles will likely lose influence and go the way of the classified ad in the Sunday paper.
Peer pressure. That little thing we all want to resist will be the new way to advertise. Social influence is huge and will only get bigger, especially in this young demographic. Peer pressure is not a new thing, but the availability of new social media tools is amping up the influence both in volume and distance. Think that all night Halo 3 marathon in four states and two countries holds any sway over kids today.
It becomes very easy to see why the advertising landscape evolves so rapidly. It’s too hard to see how the landscape will change, so the best option is to be the one driving change. They’re the only advertisers that will know where they’re going.
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The rubber meets the road…
These days everyone has a formula for marketing success and no two are exactly alike. We either adapt our clients to our direct marketing approach, or adapt strategy to the goals set forth by the client. Giving clients solid advice along backed by previous campaign metrics creates an healthy partnership and solid dialog marketing campaigns. It takes a delicate touch to offer advice without talking down to clients. Many agencies fail here. You should hear our clients relay stories of agency egos the size of conference rooms.
Revenue generation is a team sport. Marketing starts with solid prospect or customer lists.* High mail-to-web rates drive these same prospects and customers into the marketing funnel.** Sticky microsites educate these folks and prime them for discussions with sales. Sales cycles grow shorter as sales gets into deeper and deeper conversations. Decision makers and those that influence the purchase get involved. Revenue is won. It all started with established campaign expectations and a solid customer-vendor relationship.
Not all clients buy into our approach 100%, but together we find ways to leverage our creative work to meet organizational milestones and goals. At the end of the day it’s about communicating expectations, setting goals before the first brainstorming session, and executing against those goals. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
*Marketers spend far too little time cleaning lists. Traditional direct mail took a shotgun approach. You could afford bogus data, because the per unit costs were somehow justified. Not so with dimensional mail. Higher-end mail pieces help keep lists smaller with better, targeted contacts.
**Once you have a solid list it’s up to us (VLG or whatever agency you use) to deliver a value proposition to those future/current customers. Look for mail-to-web (or visit rates) over 20%. Our Dialog Marketing gives you a leg up with real-time behavior tracking online and notifications via email, SMS, or RSS feed.
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Herding Cats, Part 2
We promised feedback after week of trying out three similar mtg/event scheduling tools. To recap, we are playing around with Presdo, Tungle and TimeBridge. For our purposes TimeBridge came out on top. I encourage you to run out and try each of these apps and feel free to come back here with comments.
TimeBridge
Pro: Scheduling meetings with several busy people without haggling is our biggest pain point. Problem solved. The user interface was straight forward. Trial account left open the possibility of a cross sell to other features. (We are entrepreneurs, too. Nice to see good pricing strategy.)
Con: Sharing calendars left users confused. Most found it difficult to find the colleagues shared calendar. In the end, that’s not very useful as it makes better sense to send an invite out that fills holes in your own calendar.
Presdo
Pro: Easy to use. Super easy. That bulldog that rides a skateboard could use it. Sign up is easy, so it took no time at all to get going.
Con: Not sure how this trumps iCal or Outlook when scheduling events for your calendar. It seems like an extra step, though I understand the argument for Presdo meeting reminders in advance, which is better than most calendar apps. No collaborative scheduling. Outbound only scheduling, which make it more like a nice scheduling to-do list.
Tungle
Pro: Handles collaborative scheduling with ease. Remember, that’s our biggest pain point. UI is intuitive once you get past the early handholding. Seems this app was intended for perhaps a less web-savvy users–Wall Street v. One Dell Way. Short URL can be copy and pasted into your own email client quickly and easily. That’s an interesting feature for contacts not interested in third-party mail, or leerily of it.
Con: Some of the sharing UI is tough to navigate. It’s just me, but loads of white and purple on the page make navigation visually distracting.
Conclusion
It’s a tie (for now). We’ll continue to run Tungle against TimeBridge and vice versa until we settle on an app. Time to kick the tires when it matters–with clients. Sorry, Presdo. Nifty little app, but didn’t have enough muscle as a business tool.
Tungle
Tagline: Scheduling made easy
TimeBridge
Tagline: Run great meetings
Presdo
Tagline: Make time to “___”.
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One Response to “Herding Cats, Part 2”
Thanks for the kind remarks. Even better that we get your “cons”. That’s how we get better. We just completed some usability testing on this features. Significant improvements are on the way. Stay tuned.