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Archive for May 2009

An Award Winning Shop

May 29 2009

We always knew we were special and maybe a little different than the other boys and girls. Last night confirmed our suspicions. In a night that saw TM and Click Here trading licks by winning awards on the backs of Chick-fila and American Airlines, VLG marched in and became the first runner-up in the Most Effective Local Campaign category with our campaign for e-Rewards Market Research.

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This is a trophy-able offense and we’re extremely grateful to our client for giving us the opportunity to create something truly special for them. It’s a whole lot easier to make a winning campaign when your client has a great product and gives you a long leash.
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For a little back-patting let me say that our team did a bang up job on this campaign. They offered some good strategic insight, developed a plan of attack and our friends at e-Rewards were kind enough to let us do something unique and memorable. There aren’t many companies brave enough to mail inflated globes to launch a new product. A globe can’t really tell a compelling story, but a personalized URL driving traffic to cool interactive microsite did a heck of a job. And, yay!, somebody noticed.

SEOoooooo Helpful

May 29 2009

When you get a little public recognition you hope it turns into global recognition. One press release can get posted in a lot, a whole lot of places. Here are just a few that’ll boost our SEO.

How Long’s Your Sales Cycle?

May 28 2009

When we ask a client how long is their typical sales cycle we get the same replies. It’s six, nine or 12 months. Amazingly everyone experiences the same sales cycle. These folks may not be totally honest with themselves. In a down economy your sales cycles can stretch a month, two months or more depending on your industry, pipeline and go-to-market approach. If you get someone into the sales pipeline today, you’ll probably won’t realize any revenue from that opportunity until December or well into 2010. There are ways to cut weeks off your sales cycle.

Do a quick Google news search for articles about “longer sales cycles“? Once you get past the obvious holes in Google’s search algorithm you’ll see many, many companies are experiencing longer sales cycles. So what’s the answer? Get people into the sales pipeline earlier, craft messaging with surgical precession, and get into “better” conversations earlier in the relationship.

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We’ve been doing direct marketing programs using interactive microsites to fill pipelines for years. These programs are great when the economy is booming. The value of getting customers into a discussion with your sales team is important, really important, now more than ever. In this economy it’s even more critical to stretch that marketing dollar by targeting and getting into conversations with great sales opportunities.

Our clients and prospects seem to consistently weigh a few specific marketing options with tight 2009 budgets. One is a focus on virtual events. They cut down on airfare, hotels, bar tabs, etc. Email can be hit or miss, but it’s cheap. Some are dipping their toes in the social media waters, which is not as cheap as you might think. Social media, if done haphazardly, can waste the time of some valuable in-house resources. Then there is our solution. We offer a hybrid direct mail slash personalized microsite that gives you the best of both worlds–targeted media like dimensional mail and variable messaging with behavior stats generated by a microsite. It’s a powerful one-two punch. It also trims time off the sales cycle by bringing quality discussions forward weeks.

We get it. Budgets are tight. Our clients get it too, which is why they are filling their sales pipelines with VLG’s Dialog Marketing campaigns. Don’t take our word for it. See for yourself.

From Homely to Homey

May 28 2009

We recently gave our office that lived-in feel. It looks good, if I don’t say so myself. Our guests are more at home and our big brown couch seems more inviting. There are all kinds of pictures on our Facebook page that document our paint party. Bam! Pow! Kaboom! The only thing missing from our boredom fighter conference room is Adam West.

The message is clear. We’re open for business.

Our door is always open, but we also have a once-a-month open house inviting designers, developers, customers and prospects to hang out in the office and/or make the short trip up the road to our favorite watering hole. It’s a Big Couch Session and you’re invited. Watch this space, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn for details. Subscribe to the blog so you won’t miss a beat.

Don’t have a pair of our infamous red decoder glasses? Here’s your chance. Go to our website, pick up the marker, draw on the page and then click the red decoder glasses. Fill in your info and click submit. We’ll zip a pair right over to you. C’mon, everyone is doing it.

UEFA Cup Champions League Final Ads v. Super Bowl Ads

May 26 2009

It’s not surprising that few Americans know that the UEFA Champions League Final will be played tomorrow. The game is actually a pretty big deal, Joey. (Our copy writer doesn’t think the beautiful game is so beautiful.)

We run marketing programs throughout Europe, Central, South and North America. Although we haven’t run campaigns in China, Japan or Taiwan, we have run a couple in Australia. We’re global, which explains why we should be paying attention to tomorrow’s match.

Unlike the Super Bowl, the run-up to tomorrow’s game doesn’t include a discussion about the advertisements that will run during the game. That’s due entirely to the fact that there are no* advertisements during the game. Two 45-minute halves of football (soccer) are played without commercial interruption though you will see something that looks a lot like a banner ad running across the bottom or top of the screen.

It’s not that the Super Bowl advertisements are a distraction. They have become a part of the game. American football and the everybody else’s football are just very different sports–the Super Bowl and UEFA League Final two different events. So it makes sense that a marketing program run in both North America and the EU should deliver a different message crafted for each unique audience.

Our programs use database segmentation to deliver a different message to a different audience, even an individual person. If our campaign includes a picture of a football for one audience and a football for the other we better get it right. That’s the beauty of interactive media. It gives us the opportunity to deliver the right images, the correct message and the true motivators driving each audience to make a buy decision.

The real question is should we be pulling for Messi or Ronaldo during tomorrow’s match?
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Getting Frenched

May 22 2009

We make our living selling, designing, strategizing, building and launching marketing programs online. From Twitter to PURLs, from Facebook to WordPress, the Internet is our sandbox and we like to play. Sometimes I feel sorry for people that don’t get to do what I do for a living.

Without people tuned into the Internet we’d be up that proverbial creek without that oar, paddle, same thing. So when a government starts talking crazy talk, I pay attention. Let me start by saying piracy on the web is bad and should be stopped. I don’t want people stealing our hard work or that done by anyone else, but the French Senate just past something that feels a lot like a slippery sloop. At the risk at getting overly political, a big no-no on this blog, let me say that when a government starts talking about banning people from the Internet I get nervous.

The French passed their equivalent of the “three strikes and your out” rule for Internet piracy. Get caught stealing once, a warning, twice, another warning, but on the third time you will be banned from using the Internet for one year. How do they do that? That’s really the scary part.

Credit: Telegraph.co.uk, Sarkozy & Bruni support ban.

If you steal a book from the library, another book and a third book, should the French government ban you from reading all books? Hey, it’s Memorial weekend here in the good ol’ USA. I’m feeling kind of patriotic today. Let’s coin a new phrase for having a government, any government, ban you from the Internet. It’s called “Getting Frenched.”

The Internet’s evolution is uncertain, but a ban here, a ban there and we’re all Frenched.

GizaPage Social Networking

May 21 2009

GizaPage is a social network organizer that helps manage personal and corporate brands under one roof. The idea is ambitious, but if you’re like me it just might be a cure for the five tabs I have open in Firefox right now to run through the latest news about what Matt had for breakfast, what my wife and daughter are doing today, and the latest on the direct marketing front. Basically you’re consolidating all your online profiles.

A redundant solutions for all but the person using 15 or more social networking platform.

Signing up is easy. You create a personalized URL as your single-source destination and click the activation link. The first thing GizaPage asks you to do is import contact from one Gmail, Yahoo, LinkedIn, or similar CRM-like applications. I’m a little hestitnat to start handing out my user name and password, but you can get around this by pulling the contacts in from one of the above then changing your password. Kind of a pain, but a necessary step regardless of their promise not to keep your info on file.

Once you get past that screen the app has you add your public profiles from basically any and all social networking sites on the web. I just went with my top five, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, and Flickr. Click next, copy and past your personalized URL in your browser and hit go.

My personalized homepage was as advertised with five tabs across the top. I clicked the Twitter tab and was surprised to see not my homepage, but my homepage displayed in TwitterTree. The Twitter app is not a total waste. It expands are trimmed URLs so you have a little more information before clicking through. It’s not better or worse, just different. The other four tabs are predictable and diaplay your profile homepages for Facebook, LiinkedIn, Delicious and Flickr. No changes here.

Why should you spend time signing up for GizaPage? You shouldn’t. Your time would be better spend reading our blog, updating your status and tweeting not creating a redundant social networking site with yet another domain and another password to bookmark and remember.

Media Round Up

May 20 2009

Recent news you may have missed, but shouldn’t overlook. The business side of social media is starting to come into focus.

The Business Insider is reporting that Facebook is alpha testing a payment system to compete with Paypal and others. It’s a game changer if they can pull it off and connect the dots from ad to product to purchase all without leaving Facebook. Once the company clears some security hurdles you’ll be able to use Facebook credits to buy from third-party developers already familiar with system integration. Facebook gets a tiny slice to bolster is advertising revenue model. It’ll work. Zynga, a Facebook game maker, made about $100 million selling virtual goods on Facebook. The folks at Facebook didn’t see a dime of that revenue, but it looks like they will.

I’d hate to be a reporter on the New York Times payroll this morning. Thomson Reuters big wigs seem a little worried that Twitter may uproot some of its readers. How did the suits respond? “Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices? Does The New York Times do a good job covering sports? So-so. Do they do a good job covering business? No.” said Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer. Ouch! We know that Twitter is growing at a fever pitch (1,000%), but the New York Times at a respectable 22%. Both seem to struggle with a revenue model that sticks. What next? Also keep this in mind as you talk about your newspaper media buy. These people spend money!

What Were They Thinking?

May 19 2009

Our use of Basecamp and Highrise borders on religion. Seriously, we use Basecamp not only to manage our clients’ projects, but to administer the entire company. Marketing plan, in there. Accounting, in there. Brand guidelines, in there. It goes on and on. We leverage the Highrise CRM for all relationships with vendors, friends, customers, prospects and each other. Highrise tasks keep us running like a well-oiled machine, which is why today’s announcement boggles the mind.

37signals appears to have sold out with today’s release of Twitter integration with Highrise. Now all 10 of my clients that Tweet can have their daily routine captured in Highrise. This introduces noise, a cancer, into our CRM with little benefit. So Jason Fried and the gang don’t have time to add a long-requested feature allowing API users to tag customers and prospects, but instead jumped on the bandwagon. For a company that prides itself on being a leader, this feels a lot like a follow.

Why we care. We recently started to amp up our use of Highrise by integrating through the API to our online marketing campaigns. It’s great. We send targets to a personalized microsite, they click buttons, roll over rollovers and opt-in for goodies and information. All of this activity can now be pushed into Highrise, building a really solid customer/prospect profile for later marketing and sales touches. Awesome!

For example, we run this cool Hotel-themed campaign. If recipients opt-in we add them to Highrise, but because we can’t tag them we run the risk of sending the same campaign to the same person twice. Today’s API forces us to play Twister to extract the data. It’s so cumbersome that we keep a spreadsheet offline to make sure we don’t have campaign dups. If we were running only one campaign that might be acceptable, but when you run 5 or more campaigns simultaneously it’s overwhelming.

We think the guys and gal at 37signals are usually on their game, but what were they thinking? Nobody’s perfect. I know we aren’t, but we expect more from the inventors of Basecamp and Highrise.

Are 140 Enough?

May 18 2009

Keep your eye on a promising event coming to Southbank, London Wednesday. We recommend you follow the event here, and here, or here (Lolly always has something to say). The premise of the event is to bring together a diverse group of online personalities to discuss the impact of microblogging on mainstream media, pr, etc. If it lives up to the billing you should be able to follow the event in real-time from the comfort of your laptop.

photo courtesy: media140.com

These are some of the questions expected to be answered: Will professionals and amateurs alike provide an unfiltered, real-time account of news events? Are 140 characters enough? Will anyone be listening? Since our invitation to participate on a panel was lost in the mail, we summarized our answers below.

Yes. Amateurs and pros already committed to microblogging as a new news medium. In the 90’s a upper level journalism course titled, “The Death of Newspapers”, predicted today’s reality. Where newspapers failed, microblogging seems poised to grow and grow and grow. However, the demon that will kill all but the strongest newspapers–a solid revenue model–threatens to undo microblogging before it reaches full potential.

Microblogging fails to serve as an information destination. One hundred forty characters is a narrowcast that only gives one perspective to filter and process in real-time. Brevity does play a role in bringing topics, events and issues to the forefront just as above-the-fold headlines have done for years. Maybe that’s enough, for now, but there is danger in limiting your world view to those you follow.

Listeners, watchers, and readers supply the fuel for news media coverage, because they pay the bills. The advertising model used over the course of a traditional news cycle remains largely unchanged and no one seems to have an answer. If news becomes bifurcated and readership dispersed, advertisers have an opportunity to pounce. People may be listening in fewer numbers to more sources, but this presents some very real opportunities for the savvy direct marketer to deliver ads with surgical precision.

VLG believes direct marketing will play a huge role in the delivery of ads to these information cliques. Readers gravitate toward the news they want to hear and the issues they care about, which leaves the door open to one-to-one and one-to-several marketing. Microblogging feels a lot like another step in the evolutionary life of news media. We’re trying to take the next on the Dialog Marketing front.

VLG Dialog Marketing