Rnordman

Brands are freaking out about the rapidly decreasing organic reach of their Facebook posts, and you can’t blame them. According to a recent study conducted by Simply Measured, the total engagement for the top 10 brands on Facebook is down over 40 percent—even as total posts are up 20 percent. Per-post engagement is down more than 50 percent.

And as Contently Editor-in-Chief Joe Lazauskas wrote last week, “These numbers are even more striking when you consider engagement is significantly down even though brands are almost certainly spending more money to promote their posts to combat plummeting organic reach. Facebook’s ad revenue reached $2.27 billion in Q1 2014, up 82 percent from Q1 2013.”

To reach the same engagement, brands will likely need to spend even more. But is it worth it—especially when you consider that Facebook may shake down brands even more in the future?

There are alternatives to renting an audience on Facebook, and while they might not be as sexy as the major social network, they do allow brands to expand their reach and make the most out of their investments. Here are four steps you can take to wean yourself off relying on the social network:

1. Own your audience through email

As the social media landscape gets noisier and noiser, email marketing is making a comeback, with some companies seeing up to 60 percent open rates (or even 85 percent in some cases). Myspace co-founder Jason Hirschhorn’s new business, primarily built around a newsletter, raised millions in funding. Bestselling author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss recently added opt-ins above the fold on his website.

Having an email list also allows you to connect with your community on a granular level and strike up conversations with individual consumers. On Facebook, you can’t access each person’s individual profile; in fact, you have no idea who the actual fans of your page are, and when it comes to organic reach, you’re at the mercy of Facebook’s whims.

The challenge in growing your email list is making the content so good that people want to forward it to their colleagues and friends, and doing all the little things on your website to maximize sign-ups—see this great guide from HubSpot. (Editor’s note: At Contently, we’ve also found that Twitter lead-gen cards are a great way to attract new email subscribers.)

Once your email list starts growing, it will be a powerful asset for your brand. More importantly, the data is yours and can be securely tucked into your company’s servers—not in the hands of some social network.

2. Take your email list social

You can also use a prospect’s email to connect with their social profiles, making your email list the gift that keeps on giving. By using a service such as Full Contact, you can access information about each of your subscribers’ Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts—assuming that they’re registered under the same email address.

This information will enable you to get in touch with audience members on individual levels via multiple social networks. You can also follow audience members on these channels and see the kind of content that they are sharing.

3. Create your own community—and community chest of data

Although most brands are active on social media, they’re also starting to understand the value of building their own communities through their own platforms. A few months ago, Sephora built its own Instagram-like platform called the Beauty Board. Coca-Cola also has a platform dedicated to football (soccer) fans. And American Express has created a vibrant community of small business owners through OPEN Forum. (Full disclosure: Both AmEx and Coca-Cola are Contently clients.)

Communities deliver not only basic membership data such as email addresses and first and last names, but also user-behavior data. You can understand what types of posts resonate with your core users, which topics they’re passionate about, and what they couldn’t care about less. You can spend more time with the users that actually matter—the ones that will become advocates for your brand—instead of trying to interact with everyone, and get crucial feedback that will inform your content strategy.

4. Create a mobile or web app

With your own app, you can gain the ability to start pushing notifications to users through their mobile devices. Given how the majority of mobile phone users have smartphones, and how mobile drives 30 percent of traffic (and 15 percent of sales), connecting with users on this medium is becoming increasingly crucial.

Ion interactive co-founder and CTO Scott Brinker is bullish on mobile and web apps—so much so that he bet his entire company on it. Just make sure you focus on something that your audience actually needs. As Brinker wrote in a blog post:

“Marketing apps can be things like wizards, configurators, calculators, assessment tools, contests, interactive white papers, games, quizzes, surveys, guided tours, portals, social hubs, diagnostics, workbooks, galleries, utilities, sweepstakes, learning exercises — any kind of digital experience that actively engages prospects in a helpful or entertaining way.”

Closing thoughts

GigaOM columnist Mathew Ingram closes his article about Facebook with a warning about gaining momentum on the major social network: “While it feels great to be riding that wave, you never know how long the ride will last, or how suddenly it might dry up and leave you stranded.”

Whether Facebook is simply refining its algorithm or just trying to encourage brands to try paid solutions, it’s evident that brands are losing control of their content on the platform, and as a result, losing touch with their consumers. Take control by investing in your own infrastructure and connecting directly with your audience.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.

For years, the way advertising has been bought and sold on the internet has been fundamentally flawed.

Advertisers pay publishers based on how many times people load the web page featuring their ad, regardless of how much time a person spends looking at the ad. In actuality, it's estimated that 38% of people who visit a web page close out of the page immediately after it loads.

To combat this issue, The Financial Times is experimenting with a new currency that, if adopted across the internet, could change not only how web media companies sell ads, but how they produce the content those ads run beside.

In an interview with Contently's Sam Petulla, The Financial Times' commercial director of digital advertising Jon Slade discussed the business news site's plan to sell ads based on how long readers spend on a given web page.

He told Contently that the program is in a trial run, where the FT is selling advertisers blocks of reader time by the hour with a minimum purchase of 5 seconds.

The site is also testing the efficiency of its new metric with the hopes of showing brands that their ads are more effective if people spend more time looking at them.

"We have a hypothesis we want to prove: that the longer you show somebody a piece of brand creative, the more resonance that piece of content has with an audience," Slade said in the interview. "That’s normally not how we value advertising; we’re talking about an attention economy."

To be clear, FT's test run is not evidence of an industry sea change just yet. After all, it has more leverage than other publications to run such a trial because its large paid subscriber base makes it less dependent on ad revenues than publications without subscription services.

And, Slade says, users spend six times as much time on the site as other business publications, meaning other sites might not stand to gain as much from making such a shift.

Still, it's possible advertisers could find value in such ads and, over time, push other sites to follow suit.

In addition to the web analytics firm Chartbeat, which is working with the Financial Times, there's WebSpectator, a Brazilian company that sells ads based on time spent and has worked with TMZ and the Portuguese business publication Economico.

If the time-spent movement continues to grow, it could force publishers to focus more on keeping people on their sites with longer, text-heavy stories, as opposed to photo-heavy content designed for people to click through and share with their friends in short order.

SEE ALSO: Google Will Now Only Charge For Ads That People Can Actually See

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Poor processes equals pissed off employees! Pissed off employees equals pissed off customers.

We all have things that annoy us about our job. When you spend nearly 40% of your day (or more) in the office, you’re likely to find a few things frustrating.

An overwhelming 60 % of people said poor processes were the biggest frustration impacting their performance and satisfaction at work!

The reason for poor processes can vary. Knowing what causes these problems is the first step to resolving them. That’s why last week Tolero Solutions conducted a survey.

If you want your business to be successful – 60% is not a number to be unaddressed. Ongoing process improvement is a must.

In my line of work, I can confirm that process issues are one of the biggest obstacles affecting businesses today. This is why over the years I’ve helped businesses like yours improve processes -  which improves employee satisfaction, increasing performance, engagement, and brand loyalty. Improving processes, and removing process redundancies and inefficiencies, also increases innovation, agility, and responsiveness. This all leads to increased customer service satisfaction, reduced customer acquisition costs, and increased repeat business and brand loyalty! All that leads to increased profit. For most businesses, increased profit  is a top priority.

Processes drive the way work gets done. They support your strategy and guide your direction. They determine how you deliver products or services to your customers.

• Keep them easy to understand

• Keep them simple to execute

• Keep them non redundant

• Keep them value added

• Keep providing training

Without efficient and effective processes in place, your organization can lose productivity, inhibiting growth.

Want to ensure you have the processes in place to most efficiently and effectively get work done? Here are 3 things to consider:

Technology – Many process functions can be streamlined with the help of technology. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems can help to eliminate many process redundancies and inefficiencies. Often technology is the first go-to solution businesses investigate when faced with process issues. But just choosing a technology isn’t enough. You need to consider what solutions are the best fit for your business, and how to manage process and people changes associated with implementation, all necessities for success when upgrading or implementing technology solutions.  You can have the biggest and best IT solution, a team with all the technology skills required, but without a focus and an understanding of people, process, and change, you may not have a chance to improve your processes and service delivery. For more on this topic feel free to review our IT and people checklist.

Education – Your processes need to make sense to the people who are utilizing them on a daily basis. They should be helping to make their work easier and quicker, not more complex or redundant.  Sometimes a process may seem ridiculous or even complex and scary. Your employees need to understand your processes, why they exist, how to properly execute on them, and how doing so helps to make their work easier. This takes education and training. Part of education should allow for feedback as well. Mechanisms need to be in place, to allow those executing the processes on a daily basis, to provide input on how to streamline those processes and close any gaps. Communication is imperative.

Accountability - To resolve process related concerns that can negatively impact performance and delivery – people need to feel heard and people need to see progress toward improvement. Regardless if process frustrations are related to lack of processes, lack of training on processes, overly complex processes or poor understanding of current processes – someone needs to be accountable for process improvement. The business needs a voice and a face to employees (and customers) for process related concerns. Someone needs to frequently review current processes, analyze any employee or customer feedback, and make recommendations on how to continually improve.

Of all the things Tolero Solutions does – fixing process issues is one of the most impactful and often quick win things we can do to help your organization be more successful.  Developing streamlined and easily understandable processes and training employees on how to follow them, goes a long way toward elevating frustrations and increasing employee satisfaction and performance, which is a great step toward creating a positive customer experience. A great customer experience results in increased brand loyalty, reduction in customer acquisition costs, and increased profits!

So, after months of employee nagging, you’ve gone out and paid a small fortune for a new suite of MacBook Pros with Retina display. Congratulations – you’ve just cost your company far more than the already sizeable purchase price.

There’s even a law against what you’ve just done; Moore’s law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, states that chip performance doubles every 18 months following a prediction Moore made in 1965. While it raised a few eyebrows at the time, it’s a prophecy that’s proven to be startlingly accurate.

So according to Moore, that MacBook Pro suite has until around October next year before it’s Jurassic by tech standards. Thankfully, there’s an alternative to splashing wads of cash on perma-depreciating technology – renting.

Cast away those mental images of your parents prattling on about “dead money” and embrace renting office technology as the way forward. As Shane Bateson of hire technology supplier Microhire explains, it’s all about simple cost-benefit analysis:

“There are probably a couple of key benefits to hiring – one is that it’s 100% tax deductable, as opposed to depreciation on purchase of equipment.

“The second is maintenance and support for equipment. When it’s on hire, if it fails or needs servicing or needs replacement, that’s basically offered as part of the hire without additional cost.

While it’s true you’re able to claim depreciation on purchased technology, it takes around five years for a computer’s value to depreciate to a value of zero. Renting allows you to make a bigger tax saving on an ongoing basis, as well as saving on maintenance and repair.

Ian Wright, Business Development Manager at Expert Market, an intermediary that matches companies with office equipment suppliers, agrees that leasing offers distinct financial advantages:

“Most small businesses don’t have $20,000 to spend on a high-end photocopier printer combo – but most can probably afford to spend $100-200 a month to rent one.

“Renting means you know exactly how much you have to pay each month. Pay for a maintenance contract and you won’t even have any surprise repair bills.”

And the further down you dig, the deeper a money pit buying office technology becomes…

Once your notebooks start to crawl instead of run, you’ll need to throw another lump of cash at replacements. That leaves you with two problems – finding the money itself and figuring out what to do with the old ones. While it’s true you may be able to sell your old equipment, the low resale value won’t justify dedicating resources to finding a buyer.

The renting route on the other hand removes both of these problems. If you do your homework, you should be able to find a hire company who’ll let you upgrade to the newest technology at any time. Not only does this keep your company’s inventory as up-to-date as possible, there’s the additional benefit of the hire company taking the obsolete technology off your hands. That means you save time, and therefore money, by not wasting employee resources on facilitating the sale of your old equipment.

And for low-usage items like data projectors and presentation screens, the financial benefits of leasing extend even further. As Microhire’s Shane Bateson explains: “You don’t have that ongoing expense of housing, storing or maintaining the equipment or paying for it when it’s not in use or not needed.

“Certainly, that type of equipment use is almost always done on a short term hire basis – and definitely, there’s cost benefit there because you only pay, depending on the equipment, something like a tenth of the purchase price to hire.”

So stop buying your office technology. It’s a huge punt on a lame horse.

This is a sponsored post. 

The credit and debit card ecosystem is much bigger than MasterCard, American Express, and Visa. 

Scores of companies play different roles in the system as intermediaries, most of them as merchant-facing vendors that provide the technology and services that help businesses accept credit cards. Recently, Silicon Valley has decided they also want to compete in this market, and  introduced online, mobile, and cloud-based services that compete with those provided by the legacy players. 

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we look at the complicated series of interactions among different legacy players that powers each credit card payment, outlining the six types of companies that play key roles in the credit credit payment chain. We explain what each of these players do, and how much value they add, and explain why two parts of this chain — the hardware providers and merchant service providers (MSPs) — are particularly vulnerable to disruption.

Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are some of our key findings:

• The credit card companies themselves aren't going anywhere for now. Visa and MasterCard in particular will remain an indispensable part of the chain because they don't actually process payments. They simply provide the rails that the credit card system runs on. Credit card processors like First Data that actually do the work of processing merchants' credit card transactions on the back-end are also in a strong position.
• Two pieces in the chain are particularly vulnerable to disruption: the makers of the actual hardware — basically card readers and registers — that are used to physically accept card payments at stores, and the hundreds of vendors known as merchant service providers, or MSPs, which set businesses up to accept credit cards.
• Manufacturers of register systems are vulnerable: Point-of-sale hardware faces an immediate threat from mobile devices. These devices are cheap and easy to implement, they do not require consumers to adopt new behaviors, and they free up retailer space previously devoted to bulky hardware.
• In addition, the new payments companies — including PayPal, Leaf, Revel Systems, Square, and others — could shove traditional MSPs aside as they bridge the offline and online worlds. They pair their mobile registers with consumer-side smartphone apps, and often also provide additional merchant services, like software for loyalty programs or for parsing online consumer data. These new companies want to replace the old players that focused mainly on logistics, i.e., helping merchants take credit card payments.
• But it's not all doom and gloom yet for legacy MSPs: they have existing relationships with the majority of merchants who accept credit cards and with banks. They also have established marketing channels and large sales forces. Large MSPs will move to acquire new payments technologies to squelch the disruption threat.

In full, the report: 

• Sizes the $4 trillion U.S. credit and debit card industry, taking stock of offline vs. online volume and growth
• Gives a detailed breakdown of the entire credit card transaction process
• Defines what role each of the players occupies within that chain
• Underscores which players in the credit card transaction process are most ripe for disruption from new payments companies, and which ones remain in the strongest positions
• Explains what services these new payments companies will most likely offer to merchants and consumers
• Examines how legacy players are responding to the threats from these new payments entrants

 

Join the conversation about this story »

Success is determined by much more than hard work.  The culture you come from has a lot to do with whether you will be successful in life.  If you come from and live in a culture that doesn’t value education, chances are your education won’t help you to get ahead.  Social opportunity theory posits that your environment, social status, and networks affect which opportunities are presented to you.

East Asian cultures place a much higher value on education than we do in the United States.  It’s common knowledge that kids from South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong outrank kids from the U.S. in overall education and cognitive skills.  East Asian cultures have their roots in Confucianism, which emphasizes education, achievement, and working toward perfection.  The culture also stems from agricultural roots, which emphasizes things like teamwork and patience.

When people think of a successful person like Bill Gates, they point to the fact that he didn’t even graduate from college.  They often neglect to point out that he was born into an upper middle class family and attended one of the few schools that had computer access in the 1960s.  His background and access had a lot to do with his success.

For more about how culture and background affect your potential, check out this infographic.  Do you have a different take?  Be sure to leave us a comment below!

The freemium model is in the ascendancy when it comes to apps.

Paid apps peaked in 2013 according to Jon Reynolds, CEO of SwiftKey. SwiftKey provides an app bringing smart prediction technology to your mobile keyboard and, indeed, has itself gone down the freemium route.

The app used to cost $4 and was consistently in the paid charts, now it's free to download, with in-app purchases available.

So, what are the reasons for and consequences of the rise of freemium apps?

Penetration

Penetration is one of the 4Ps of mobile. The percentage of people boasting a smartphone is large enough to provide free infrastructure for businesses such as Uber. Penetration also makes the freemium model possible.

Jon talked (at a Quartz and General Assembly event during London Tech Week) about how SmartKey began as a paid app, chiefly to prove the value of the product. What would users pay for this app? How valuable a tool was it?

With smartphone ownership more than 50% in the US, and not far away in the UK, the sheer scale of adoption possible in 2014 creates the opportunity for other business models.

The trend from the East for stickers and customising mobile (via in-app purchases) is one that may or may not take off to the same heights in the West.

Even if it doesn't, the number of people who pay to personalise SwiftKey (by buying a new virtual keyboard) will be a percentage of a much larger number of users.

The curve of customer love

With big numbers of potential customers provided by smartphone penetration, freemium comes into its own.

This is because in-app purchases allow your most enthusiastic customers to spend a lot more than $4. It also allows those that wouldn't have paid $4 to perhaps pay $2.99 for an upgrade.

Most customers will fall into the green section under the curve of user numebrs against price paid (shown below). Essentially, the big spenders are in the long tail, and freemium allows for this tail.

Try before you buy

The obvious benefit of freemium. If you think your app is really good, let people use it and then sell them something else.

The easiest way to win a customer is not on faith but on action.

In-app advertising

Here's where scale comes into play once more. Mobile advertising is a key subsidy for all those beloved but unprofitable free downloaders. In the last year, mobile advertising has taken off.

By 2015, it's predicted to account for more than radio, out-of-home and magazine ads, with digital as a whole taking around 8% of global ad spend (and mobile representing 19% of digital ad spend).

Advertising from Google, Facebook and Twitter accounts for 70% of mobile ad spend, but in-app display networks, now often bought through programmatic buying are taking off.

The time smartphone users spend in apps is thought to be around 85%, so advertising in apps is proving lucrative.

The marketing cycle

More people are now at home with mobile marketing. Well-oiled machines exist at the intersection of mobile and the web. SEO, mobile PPC, app promotion through social and display advertising, push notifications to encourage engagement, email to encourage web browsing of mobile optimised content.

Free apps allow for another marketing channel to non-paying subscribers. The more comfortable marketers are with marketing across channels, the better value can be attributed to free users in the bigger picture for companies that have a range of products.

Spotify

There have always been free apps on mobile. Mobile users are accustomed to getting apps for free.

But Spotify might be the key service that solidified freemium. It might not be making money yet, but it sure sells a lot of advertising. And with so much music for free, uninterrupted at a modest fee, the user is increasingly feeling entitled to services for free, or at least their vanilla versions.

Check out the numbers for Spotify.

                     

India and emerging markets

Emerging markets are generally big on mobile, and India is massive. To attain a big initial market share in emerging markets, apps will have to be free. This is obvious enough, but there's also the fact that devices like the Aakash tablet are being developed for use in India.

The tablet's production and connectivity is subsidised by advertising and content, which allows a very cheap price point.

If price points remain low for a while to come, apps for Android will be freemium or bust.

You’ve heard it before: When developing a content marketing strategy, you must start by determining what you want your content to accomplish. Though creating high-quality, compelling content is a tremendously significant part of the content marketing process, it’s even more important that your content proves to be effective — nothing else matters if your content doesn’t help you achieve a business goal.

As is the case with any marketing strategy, measurement and tracking against benchmarks and goals is necessary in proving content marketing ROI. Though there are a multitude of tools available to measure the effectiveness of your content, Google Analytics is a “one stop shop” that most website owners utilize from the get-go. However, due to the wealth of data this tool can provide, it can be difficult to determine exactly which information will be most informative. So here are three suggestions for using Google Analytics to measure the potential success of your content marketing strategy:

1. Traffic and time on page

Often, traffic alone is not a great indicator of content marketing success, but coupled with other metrics it can be particularly insightful. For example, your home page is probably one of the most visited pages on your site — but this isn’t always due to the content found there. If you’re employing basic SEO and promotion strategies correctly (and they are functioning properly), chances are your home page will always be one of your most visited pages, regardless of how useful the content you publish there is to your visitors.

Tip: In order to use traffic volume to measure content marketing success, compare pages of similar content to each other, as all pages are not created equal.

Lets look at an example: The graph below shows a huge spike in overall traffic to my company’s site, which occurred during the week of March 1. Data like this should prompt a website owner to take a deeper dive into Google Analytics data to determine the cause, which is exactly what we did.

In this instance, we determined that the traffic spike could mainly be attributed to one of our blog posts that was shared on a popular Facebook page. As you can see in the screenshot below, a company with a very active community shared the post, which prompted many “likes,” comments and shares. All of this activity contributed to a high volume of traffic. Because of this post, other Facebook users and pages shared the link with their audiences as well. As a result, this post still garners a few visits a day, despite it being published months ago.

A blog post or web page with a high volume of page views can likely be considered a strong content page, as it is obviously drawing a good amount of interest from your audience. But another metric to consider on high-traffic pages is the time on page.

When the average time on a particular page is much higher than your site-wide average, it suggests that this page is grabbing and keeping visitors’ attention more than other pages, indicating that the content there is worth analyzing more deeply, to see what additional insights it might provide.

As you can see from the image below, the average time on page for our infographic post was nearly twice that of our site-wide average at the time, which told us that audiences were interested in the content we published on that page, and gave us a benchmark for comparisons to other content we plan to publish on our blog as part of our content marketing strategy.

2. Measuring referral traffic

Referral traffic shows visits to your website or page that originally came from an outside source. For example, if a visitor clicks a link on a social media site like Facebook or Twitter that leads to your website, that visit is considered a referral, since the social media site referred the visitor to your site.

Measuring referral traffic in Google Analytics can be done in many different ways. One way is through the referral traffic report (under “acquisition”). A second is by choosing “referral path” or “full referrer” from the list of secondary dimensions.

You most likely have a content promotion and/or distribution strategy in place to get your content in front of your audience — for example, you may be sharing your content on social media sites, promoting it through email marketing and submitting the links to bookmarking sites. (If your content is valuable, your audience will share, email, and bookmark your content on their own accord, as well.) As sharing increases, your promotional efforts will likely result in an uptick in referral traffic. This referral traffic can be a testament to the effectiveness of your promotion and distribution efforts by providing insights on which sites are referring the most traffic and the timing of the traffic being referred.

For example, the screenshot below shows referral traffic to an infographic from a “full referrer” secondary dimension report gathered from Google Analytics. The infographic has received 8,451 page views (7,609 unique page views), with referral traffic from a variety of sources. As you can see in the Full Referrer column, the infographic received many visits as a result of being shared on Facebook and StumbleUpon, as well as from the blogs that linked to it. Because of this, the website owner may consider submitting similar content to StumbleUpon and comparable bookmarking sites to get its future content efforts in front of those same engaged audiences.

3. Measuring downloads

A common practice in content marketing is to create downloadable content for audiences. More often than not, the downloadable piece is kept behind a gated link — meaning visitors must fill out a contact form in order to gain access to the content. However, sometimes visitors are able to download content without providing any additional information. In those instances, it is necessary to set up “event tracking” in Google Analytics to capture the incidence of your content being downloaded.

Once you have event tracking set up, you can establish an event goal to track downloaded content conversion rate. When setting up your event goal in Google Analytics, you must set conditions for your goal and specify a category, action, label, and value. You also must assign a value to the goal — either the value you provided when originally setting up the event, or another value of your choosing. In the case of measuring downloads, the event will be the act of downloading the piece of content.

After your event goal is set up, you will be able to find the number of people who are actually downloading your content, without requiring any additional contact information from your visitors in your prefer. This data can be used in conjunction with other metrics (like page views and time on page) to measure the success of your content offers.

Consider this example: A piece of content was downloaded 5,438 times, as measured by event tracking. Additionally, a goal was set up to register when that event (someone downloading the content) took place. A total of 16,719 visitors, 15,243 unique visitors and 5,434 downloads were captured.

Evaluate the conversion rate by measuring it against conversion rates of similar content pieces. In an instance like this where the content isn’t gated, conversion rate is especially telling, as there is no risk associated with downloading the content piece.

In conclusion

Overall, there are several ways to measure the performance of content marketing strategies through Google Analytics. As you may expect from a tool used by more than 10 million websites, the amount of data available in Google Analytics is vast, and much of it can be used to prove ROI. From traffic and time on page to referral traffic and number of downloads, much of the data needed to measure against a range of possible content marketing goals is available in Google Analytics.

How are you using Google Analytics to measure content marketing success? I’d love to hear from you.

Want more insight from experts like Arnie Kuenn on how to manage today’s biggest content marketing challenges? Sign up for our Content Marketing Institute Online Training and Certification program. Access over 35 courses, created by experts from Google, Mashable, SAP, and more.  

2014 is another exciting year for mobile.

With many new technologies coming to market, emotional investment in our devices along with usage is at an all time high.

This is the definitive A to Z guide to mobile marketing and commerce. Enjoy...

A: Adaptive Web Design & RESS

Responsive web design (RWD) is popular right now and to some it’s become a silver bullet solution. However,  adaptive web design (AWD) is the gold standard, if you can afford it. 

With AWD, layout is determined server side to enable the delivery of the most appropriate version of the site based on the functionality of the device. This means that load times are quick, optimisation is easier, and the site is more appropriate to the device, along with being able to reach non-smartphone users.

For brands where context is king, such as in retail and travel, being more device-specific rather than screen-specific is likely to produce bigger returns. Responsive Web Design with Server Side Components (RESS) is a cross between RWD and AWD - a hybrid solution that ensures your solution is more ‘next generation’ by ensuring pages load faster and work on more devices.

RESS provides relevant content and call-to-actions specific to the device. In doing so the user benefits from a richer and more engaging experience.

I expect to see more brands choosing adaptive and RESS over responsive this year, especially when so many brands are experiencing RWD projects that come in late and over budget. 

Lufthansa's use of adaptive design shows how experiences can be tailored according to likely user behaviour.  

B: Beta & minimum viable products

Once highly popular, I predict a resurgence in launching in Beta as a way to get minimum viable products on mobile out to market quickly. It helps avoid making big decisions based on what people say versus what people do.

Early users help to inform the features, expansion and improvements on the mobile roadmap, with success (or failure) early on helping to dictate future investment. Circa 90-day turnaround minimum viable products will become more popular in getting something feasible out to market.

Doing this allows businesses to gain useful feedback early on, enabling you to alter the product to suit customer needs. This method allows you, in some cases, to fail quickly and early, which saves you time and money.

Innovation needs to get out of PowerPoint quicker and by making rather than talking, you can build the future, rather than asking your customers to predict it as per the famous Henry Ford quote. 

C: Consumer first, mobile first is dead

A Google Executive recently declared ‘mobile first’ dead.

Driven by the rise of the smartphone, the principles of ‘mobile first’ are important, but the notion that the consumer is always a mobile consumer, and not a cross channel / device consumer can be dangerous.

Today’s consumers switch between devices to achieve tasks and expect brands to keep up. Therefore focusing solely on mobile devices can be a myopic approach.

Instead marketers need to adjust their messages to suit consumer’s multi-device behaviour. 

D: Drivables

CarPlay, by Apple, enables drivers to use their iPhone apps through their car through a USB connection.

Drivers can control CarPlay using voice through Siri; they can request songs, call someone, dictate text messages and ask for directions all through voice control.

The benefit of voice control means that drivers are not nearly as distracted as they would be if taking their eyes off the road to fiddle with their iPhone, therefore CarPlay promotes safer driving.

Drivers can also control CarPlay using a touchscreen display or using the car’s in-built controls.

Other companies are working on their versions of car systems; these include Microsoft Sync, and Google’s Android-based system, The Open Automotive Alliance.

The ‘Drivables’ trend of in-car technology and evolving interface design will be important this year. As penetration increases input techniques such as voice control will become normalised which will have implications on interaction design across all connected devices. 

E: Empathy

In mobile it’s easy to get distracted by chasing the new trend.

Sometimes we do things because we can, rather than because we should! Empathy for the consumer is key, as is adding value with your mobile proposition: How will your audience during the course of their busy life gain value from the interaction with your brand on their most personal device?

Often being useful is a great way to stand out. Get in touch with your inner consumer, or speak to real ones, to avoid being annoying in creating a mobile white elephant.

A great way to do just this and get in touch with your consumer, is through user testing. Ask your consumers those all important questions, understand their attitude towards your brand and why they may choose a competitor over you, and most importantly ask what they want and need from you.  

F: Facebook

There is plenty we can learn from Facebook’s mobile journey. Facebook have cracked how to make money from mobile.

In Q4 of 2013 Facebook sales reached more than $1bn from mobile advertising alone. The number of mobile Facebook users has also rocketed; at the start of 2013 there were more daily desktop users than mobile, but within just one year there were around 200m more mobile users than desktop.

As there are 556m people accessing Facebook on their smartphone or tablet every day, it is imperative that the mobile user experience is optimised.

Before Facebook’s huge mobile success, version four of the native app was rated just one-star in the app store by more than half of its users. Facebook listened to the users and redeveloped the native app in 2012, focussing on improving the speed of use and functionality through changing the programming language.

Version four was written in HTML5 so that one app could be used across all platforms, but this resulted in a lower quality performance. Version five is written in the native language for iOS, Objective-C, which has drastically improved the user experience, as it’s significantly quicker.

Facebook can be used for mobile marketing in a number of ways: to build awareness, views and clicks in news feed; or by using Facebook as a sign-in to your mobile experience to make it more personal and capture data. 

G: Great expectations (not good)

Our increased emotional dependency on our mobile devices is raising the bar for brands.

Good isn’t good enough anymore! Simply repackaging web content, ignoring the context of mobility and the opportunities of location relevance, as well as other mobile sensors, isn’t good enough anymore.

Consumers have great expectations, not good expectations. Are you raising the bar and giving your audience what they want? 

H: Heavy

Unfortunately it’s easy to make a responsive site overly heavy in terms of page weight, which may lead to frustrated users.

An example of a heavy site is Sony’s ‘Be Moved’ RWD. The landing page is 53 Mb in size and to some is a month’s data allowance in one page - that is not something a consumer is going to thank you for!

Due to the size, the page takes forever to load.

The lesson here is to ensure that you are being responsible with your page weight and QA for speed across 3G or Wi-Fi.

I: iBeacon 

iBeacon, part of Apple’s iOS7 but also compatible with Android 4.3 upwards, is a way for brands to engage with their customers once they are in close proximity to a specific location and have downloaded a specific application.

There are over 30 beacon hardware vendors already, from Estimote to Swirl, and they transmit data to your mobile based on proximity ranges via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).

Marketers are excited about the opportunities, and it’s important that brands use this new technology responsibly, a notable example being Tesco trialling it but not using the technology for marketing messages yet.

Outside of retail, the most inspiring iBeacon example I’ve seen so far is the recent “Sweeper” exhibit and installation for the UN at the New Museum in NYC which recreated a deadly minefield, in-order to raise awareness to the threat of landmines around the world.

Using iBeacon, the installation recreated this lethal experience via an app people downloaded to their mobile, and as they walked by a beacon, visitors triggered an explosion sound along with hammering home the gory details of the attack. This then led to a donations page.

What is impressive here is that they’ve solved the value exchange equation of seeing messages you would want to receive, and managing the barrier to entry of needing an app and Bluetooth turned on, in order to interact.

 

J: jQuery 

I’ve mentioned the problem with heavy websites and the benefit of using RESS technology.

jQuery mobile is another method of optimising the Web browsing experience for mobile devices.

It allows pages to load faster by loading the necessary items on the page straight away with the rest of the page elements loading as they are needed, which is important for user satisfaction (see ‘Loading times’).

jQuery is a framework devised of simpler and shorter codes thus developers can implement jQuery more quickly and robustly.

Many companies are increasingly using jQuery or other mobile frameworks such as Backbone and Zepto.js due to their advantages and it is predicted to be a big part of the future of Web development. 

K: Killer apps

Killer apps were all the rage during intense platform battles. For example, Halo was Xbox’s killer app.

The idea of uniqueness, a first of its kind and a hook that gets you talked about can be used for mobile when thinking about the key feature(s) you will deliver through mobile.

So with a native application spend some time thinking about how you would list and PR your app and it’s killer features early in the project, not when it’s too late.  

L: Loading

Whether you are hyper tasking, multi tasking or mono tasking, the most precious resource to a mobile user in 2014 is time.

Many studies have demonstrated the negative impact of slow sites on sales. There are lots of statistics kicking around that claim that load time should not be more than five seconds, or four seconds or even one second.

Google states that just a two second load time is disruptive to the user experience and is the maximum a delay can be. Kissmetrics say that if an ecommerce site is making $100,000 per day, then a 1-second delay could cost you $2.5m in lost sales every year.

The moral of the story is simple; make sure your load time is as close to instant as possible and your users will be happy, anymore than this and you are increasing the likelihood of users becoming impatient, frustrated, and leaving your site.

M: Multi-screening

Multi-screening, when more than one device is used at one time, is a continuing powerful trend due to our increasing need for information immediacy and ever present human interaction.

Multi-screening is often used to investigate products, to use social media, and often we start an activity on one device and continue it on another. Research suggests that the majority of consumers using a second screen to look for TV related content are either using ‘search’, or social media.

Twitter can actually improve live TV. Fast Web Media found that out of 10m active UK Twitter users, 60% are tweeting while watching TV, and 40% are tweeting about TV. This gives the opportunity to engage with thousands of consumers and get a conversation flowing about your brand. 

Successful campaigns use specific hashtags, for example using the brand name or brand slogan. Three’s #DancePonyDance is an example of a brand successfully engaging with users on a second screen; understanding multi-screening behaviour can allow you to do the same.

What’s new this year is the improved ability for our devices to talk to each other.

Examples include Apple’s Airplay, and Google Chromecast, which is fundamentally changing our content consumption habits.  

There's also Samsung’s Chord (as part of its new mobile SDK), which enables multi-Samsung-device experiences which will open up a world of screen sharing, collaborative shopping and new opportunities with multi-screen gaming.

N:Native

Consumers love Native Apps, and the data backs it up with 86% of time spent on mobiles in Apps (according to Flurry).

The challenge of App discovery has not gone away, neither has the need to build reach and engagement with an impressive solution that people love and use. Build it and they may or may not come.

Launch planning, app PR, and mobile media are on the rise, as is mobile analytics and the use of social listening tools to track conversations, to ensure the user is listened to, and the experience is constantly improved.

The benefits of native apps include the commercial opportunities, use of sensors such as location, potential for habitual use, offline mode, speed, access to camera, and they generally provide a richer and higher-class experience for users.

O: OS Wars 

The leading mobile Operating Systems are always evolving and expanding, meaning marketers must keep up-to-date with the latest developments to see how they can utilise them. 

The versioning evolution across platforms is very different; Apple’s latest iOS7 has a penetration of more than 90% where as Android KitKat has a penetration of around 5%. So OS fragmentation is very real.

Brands developing apps for Q4 this year should be mindful of iOS 8 and the phablet user experience problems meaning potential changes ahead to swipes, back buttons and App layout.

In terms of the iOS7 major redesign it served to help hide call to actions and interaction near the screen edges on carousels caused problems.

In a recent poll investigating which emerging mobile operating system is the likeliest to succeed, the majority voted Ubuntu Touch followed by Sailfish, Tizen, and then Firefox.

Keep your eyes on these new players to see how interaction design evolves and exploit new opportunities that open up.  

P: Programmatic ad buying

Programmatic buying allows you to automatically buy the right ad at the best price at the right time on the right device.

If you are a marketer that understands and implements automated buying technology then you are actually in the minority, as according to Forrester and the Association of National Advertiser 67% of marketers need to learn more about it, don’t understand it, or are unaware of it entirely.

Basically automated ad buying is a way for marketers to place bids for advertising space through an automated technology.

‘Programmatic’ ad buying refers to the different ways of doing this, and it’s taking off in mobile. Programmatic marketing works by a campaign being triggered by a set of rules that are applied by software and algorithms. Marketers establish a strategy and set up these rules, which are then implemented by the software.

For example, it can be used to send an automated email campaign to consumers that have abandoned their shopping basket on a website. Programmatic advertising is more efficient and lower in cost than human ad buying, and can be used for mobile advertising and marketing campaigns. 

Q: QR Codes

QR codes work by a barcode scanner application on a smartphone processing a code, directing the user to a website or promotion.

When used appropriately QR codes can be effective, by increasing consumer engagement with print to enrich the user experience.

There is wide scepticism on whether QR codes are ‘dead or alive’, yet it is clear that in Asia the use of QR codes is still growing.

In China, Pernod Ricard is deploying QR codes across all packaging in-order to increase engagement and reduce counterfeiting.

R: RWD 

Responsive Web Design (RWD) refers to a website that resizes itself depending on the device it is being accessed from.

It works by using fluid grids with page elements sized by proportion. It’s often the first stage on a brand’s mobile journey. The problem is, it’s easy to make a bad RWD site.

Using RWD is a step in the right direction, although due to drawbacks such as possible delayed loading times, considering the ‘next generation’ of RWD, known as RESS (see ‘Adaptive and Reiss Technology’) would be advantageous to the marketer and the user. 

S: Strategy 

2014 is the year to make mobile strategy a priority.

Mobile strategy is moving up the agenda and informing business and communications strategy. Given the complexity and opportunities of mobile, I find the best way to deal with complexity is through simplicity.

So ask the right questions up front by seeking to understand the business and consumer context, along with the capabilities and constraints.

Outline the mobile opportunity and then blueprint the solution budget and tactics to help make it happen.  

T: Text

It might be 2014, but don't assume text/SMS is disappearing as a valuable comms tool. It's simple, immediate and effective.

Out of all marketing text messages sent to consumers, over 95% are opened and read, with 83% being read within one hour. Redemption rates for marketing text messages can be relatively high, and due to the low cost of sending an SMS, marketers can attain a high Return on Investment.

It’s an impressively versatile tool for global or local campaigns and is not smartphone only. O2 frequently uses this method of connecting with their O2 More customers.  

U: User Testing

User testing is more important than ever in 2014 given the costs of creating and promoting mobile experiences.

Testing your mobile website and/or app on your current or potential customers is an effective method of ensuring your product provides a positive user experience.

User testing involves your typical customers engaging with your mobile website or app, interesting findings and any problems users encounter are noted by expert consultants.

Findings often include attitude towards a brand, ease of use, and understanding users’ needs and wants.

The consultants recommend how to optimise the user experience based on the findings. The benefits of user testing includes allowing you to fail quickly and cheaply if ideas are not viable, and implementing findings is likely to increase consumer engagement and conversion rates.  

V: Voice Control

Voice input with the likes of Google Now and Siri is becoming better and more mainstream: it’s a game changer for us all. Voice command is convenient and beneficial for drivers, by using voice instead of fiddling around with buttons, there will be a reduction in distraction leading to an improvement in safety and user experience.

Voice is now entering mobile advertising to help create cut through and dramatise product features. Toyota implemented voice command in their mobile advert to promote a new in-car entertainment system.

The advert mimics the car system by encouraging the individual to use voice command to choose one of two apps that are presented; weather and iHeartradio. Using voice for mobile marketing campaigns is beneficial as it engages the user in the advert giving them a memorable and richer experience. 

W: Wallet

Using mobile devices to make payments is a growing trend. Calisle and Gallagher Consulting Group predict that by 2017, half of today’s smartphone users will be using mobile wallets as their preferred payment method. 

PayPal is working with iBeacon to facilitate hands-free payments (see ‘iBeacon’), whilst many others are developing their own digital wallets including Google, Apple and Amazon.

Currently in the U.S. approximately 10m Starbucks customers pay using the mobile app. The success of the app is down to the ease and speed of the service, and the way it enhances the customer’s experience, for example users are exposed to instant discounts and a reward programme.

It helps marketers to build relationships with consumers and opens up a direct marketing channel.  

X: X-ray

Mobile is changing the way we view the world thanks to augmented reality and mobile interface design. An example is the 'X is for X-ray' app by Touch Press that is available for iPhone and iPad.

It is a highly visual, interactive and educational ebook that shows 26 everyday objects.

With the swipe of a finger X-ray photography of these objects are presented giving users the ability to explore the inner structure of objects with a 3D view.

‘X is for X-ray’ is a breakthrough in how we can explore the complexity of 3D structures through a smartphone or tablet. This innovative app shows some of the new capabilities that are possible with new devices. 

 

Y: Yoda

The following conversation from Empire Strikes Back can be applied to mobile marketing:

Luke: All right, I’ll give it a try.

Yoda: No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try.

Do mobile or do not do mobile. The latter isn’t really a viable choice any more. So don’t set out and attempt to try and do mobile. Make it a priority and make your customers a priority. Launching with a one star app isn’t really an option is it? 

Z: Zzzz

With the rising wearables trend along with Apple’s HealthKit it all points towards even more opportunities to track your quantified self.

For example ‘Sleep Cycle’ is an app that senses your body movements when asleep in order to wake you up when you are in the lightest sleep state. A number of other sleep apps have different purposes, such as detecting and recording sounds to identify snoring issues. 

On the subject of wearables and health, various apps aid the management of fitness and food consumption, such as ‘Runtastic’, ‘Map My Run’ and ‘My Fitness Pal’. ‘Fitbit One’ logs the number of calories burned and can also measure sleep.

‘The Lumoback’ is designed to improve posture, it involves a sensor that sends data to a smartphone, which then reminds the individual to sit up straight by displaying a stickman that mimics their current posture. 

Econsultancy has a range of reports looking at best practice around mobile marketing and commerce: 

Mobile Web Design and Development Best Practice Guide

Mobile Commerce Compendium

Finding the Path to Mobile Maturity

I graduated from Arizona State University in 3 years with honors. I don’t say that to brag, but to put the following paragraph in context.

When I announced to my dad that I was going “into sales” I could detect an ounce (more like a pound) of concern. Why on earth would I go to all that effort to earn a business degree at warp speed and with summa cum laude recognition and then waste it on a career as a salesperson.  OK, he might not have exactly said “waste” but that’s what he meant. Two things were behind his concern:

1. Why did I need a business degree for a sales job (anyone can do sales, you don’t need a degree)
2. Why not use that knowledge on something that is more deserving, like becoming a CPA or you know, some other professional career.

My dad’s concerns were forgotten over time seeing that I could make a good living and I was coming into my own.  That’s really all he wanted—for me to have a steady job that paid well and provided some security. Even so, I’m sure the nagging concern that Sales was somehow a less-than-profession took some time to dissipate.

Nothing could please me more, than to see how much things have changed. This was in the early ‘80s. The sales profession has come a long way since then. No doubt, the growth of the computer industry and the rapid acceleration of high-tech deserve great credit for the transformation of Sales into a key role. Companies like Xerox and IBM began rigorous sales training programs that turned college grads into top revenue generating professionals.

Here we are now 30 years later. Gartner forecasts the Worldwide Information technology industry alone, to hit $3.8 TRILLION. Do you know what that means? It means there are a lot of salespeople helping buyers make decisions on technology solutions. Of course that’s just one sector. If you search for people in LinkedIn with the keyword “sales” you’ll see nearly 23 million. 23 million! It’s no wonder that more than 50 universities are now offering programs in Sales.

Even well-known management and business experts have taken an interest and are writing about the subject of sales in books like the one by Dan Pink, “To Sell is Human.”  And of course there are equally great books by sales industry experts like, well, like many of the people that were recently named by OpenView Labs as top 25 Sales Industry influencers: Jill Konrath, Mike Weinberg, Colleen Francis, Mark Hunter, Kendra Lee, and Aaron Ross.

In fact the reason why I’m writing about all of this is to acknowledge both the recognition and the contribution that OpenView Labs has given to the profession. They have been an amazing resource for business people and sellers that want to stay up-to-date on the latest thinking about the world of Sales. And for the third year, they’ve recognized 25 people for their contribution to the industry.

Would my dad have felt better way back when, if I had told him that someday I’d be recognized as one of the top 25 sales industry influencers? Perhaps. But it isn’t needed now, he changed his mind on the whole thing long ago. Like others, he’s come to realize that to sell is human. And to sell as a profession is one of the most enjoyable, challenging, rewarding, and enriching careers I could ever have imagined.

Thank you, Openview Labs, for this wonderful honor. But most importantly, for your own contribution to the sales profession and to your commitment to helping companies grow through smarter selling strategies and processes.

Note: If you’d like to hear four of these sales industry influencers in one webinar, you’re in luck. Dan Enthoven of Enkata will be joined by Jill Konrath, Miles Austin, Mark Hunter and Mike Weinberg for an interesting discussion on: ” How to Manage Underachievers on Your Sales Team.” The webinar is free and even if you can’t attend, you’ll receive access to the recording.

It’s no surprise that social media has become one of the most important tools for marketers to leverage during live events and sports games.  Social gives brands the power to engage and influence consumers second by second.

In an effort to seize real-time opportunities and become part of the social conversation during the World Cup, marketers will be connecting with their consumers through #hashtags, “brand newsrooms” will be abuzz with trending topics, and consumers will be prompted to share ads across their networks.

In fact, the World Cup is already prepared to be the most social sporting event ever.

Mashable recently reported that this year’s World Cup ads have already been shared more than the 2014 Super Bowl commercials. With all the content brands are pushing out, it’s a smart move for brands to get involved in creative ways.

This recently released “Social Side of the World Cup” infographic shows that, from a poll of over 850 men and women, 74.2% of viewers will be on social media during the World Cup. After the games, 42% of viewers are likely to be posting about their favorite ads and 52% are likely to follow or like a brand.

One way to engage in social influence is to find your brand’s advocates and leverage them. Remember that  92 percent of people trust the recommendations they receive from friends and family above all other forms of advertising. This means that you can push your content out to your audience, but it may go unnoticed unless someone they trust tells them to pay attention.

Search your customer relations management systems and followers on social channels. Your repeat buyers and social followers already posting positive mentions about your brand are your advocates. Develop partnerships with them to create and share branded, user-generated content (UGC), which increases your credibility.

The World Cup is heating up for brands, and the best social strategy will take the gold.

Crowdtap polled 850+ men and women in May 2014.

For more Social Side infographics, visit http://go.crowdtap.com/socialside.

Content marketing is center stage now in the world of B2B Marketing. Countless studies show that more and more organizations are increasing their spend on content marketing, committing to content strategies and others are developing content teams. However, many organizations are struggling to see much, if any, payback from their increased spend and efforts in content marketing.

Before organizations begin to paint their organizations with a very general content marketing “strategy” brush stroke, they would benefit greatly from understanding that not all content is created equal and just “investing more” or “having a strategy” does not equate to success. Marketers must be sure to be very prescriptive in their approach to content marketing.

Let me explain further.

In looking at Demand Generation, there are specific content types that should be developed. At ANNUITAS we look at three stages of content – Engage, Nurture & Convert.

• Engage Content is content designed to address the buyers top of mind issues, interests and frame their pain points. This content is designed to begin the dialogue with the buyer.
• Nurture Content is focused on moving past the top of mind issues and into more specific solution categories that match the buyers challenges and pain points.
• Convert Content is solution-specific content and delivered at the point in time the buyer is through their purchase process.

While each of these content types is used in Demand Generation, the content in and of itself is different. However many organizations are not differentiating which is preventing them from having true success. According to the preliminary results of the ANNUITAS Enterprise Demand Generation Survey, only 29% of organizations align their content to the various stages of the buyer’s journey and only 38% develop content specifically for nurturing. This means marketers are using general content for a specific purpose. Unfortunately, with content relevance being so relevant today, this generic approach will simply will not work.

In addition to needing various content types for Demand Generation, the need for unique content does not stop there. Organizations need to begin thinking about the content needed for brand, product marketing, promotional marketing, customer marketing, etc. Each of these is unique in and requires specific and unique content.

Let’s circle back to Demand Generation to get a better understanding of why this is so essential. The goal of Demand Generation is to intersect with the buyer at the time they begin their purchase process i.e. a “trigger”. These triggers can be caused by an organizational shift, market condition or other factors. It is at this point that specific content needs to be created to first Engage the buyer as detailed above. However, there are many interactions a buyer may have with an organization before they move into a full-fledged buying cycle. These interactions necessitate the need for relevant branding content.

This means very different purposes necessitating very different content as the buyer is interacting in different ways with a different mindset at every stage.

As many marketers continue to look at ways to maximize their content and define their strategies, it is first necessary to understand what purpose the content will be used for, then the strategy can be defined and the content properly developed.

Looking up the definition of media reveals it’s Latin derivation to be: middle layer.

That middle layer used to be the television, radio, and newspaper media that was necessary to reach a targeted audience.

Now we are the media. Tweet this

The middle layer still exists, but its utility for most businesses is limited at best.

Whether you think of your business media as social media, blogging, or your company website, it’s all digital media that your business is responsible for managing to ensure its relevancy for the communities it serves.

The following three tests will help you evaluate your media for the digital, social, and global environment that affects every business today, regardless of its size, location, or industry.

Test #1 – Is Your Media a Valuable Resource?

Last week I interviewed my friend Ryan Hanley for my new podcast (launching the week of June 23rd). He shared an elegantly simple method for creating valuable content to attract a larger audience of potential customers for the the family-owned insurance company he worked for at the time (now they are a client).

Having previously worked in the financial services industry, Ryan was new to insurance, and understandably had lots of questions. The more he learned, the more he realized his customers probably had many of the same questions.

His plan was to answer 100 insurance questions in 100 days by recording his response on video and uploading it to YouTube. The total production time required was less than 20 minutes per day. The result was a body of knowledge that proved to be invaluable for attracting new business.

You can do this too. It’s not necessary to have everything completely planned to get started. Simply begin with the most frequently asked questions that you can probably answer in your sleep, and then work out the others as you move forward.

Test #2 – Is Your Media Outward Facing?

Traditional marketing promotes the business, such as why it is better than its competitors. It’s media that faces inward.

Outward facing media keeps the focus on the community, and that is what works in the social environment where we are today. This media seeks to help the community do more of what it wants to do.

Ryan’s series of 100 videos helps insurance buyers make better decisions to this day. Before the Internet, my landscape business used a similar approach with print media (read it for FREE by downloading the intro and 1st Chapter of Built-In Social). The downside was we had to regularly pay that media middle layer for the opportunity. No more.

When it comes to marketing, what’s old is new again. Outward facing media resonates with buyers whose first concern is learning what they need to know to limit their choices down to just a few companies.

It turns out choice limiting decisions are being made long before a salesperson has a chance to get in the game. Thus, the right media is absolutely necessary today for your business survival.

Test #3 – Is Your Media Trustworthy?

For media to be a successful lead generator, it has to be attractive. Buyers intuitively ask the following three questions to make that assessment.

a. Does the business want to help?
b. Is the business capable of helping?
c. Will I enjoy working with this business?

Test #1 – The first question is answered by having an online presence designed to help the community. I’m sorry to say this, but nowadays a lack of resources online where people expect to find them strongly suggests the business doesn’t care enough to help.

Test #2 – Outward facing media is tangible proof the business has what it takes to help prospective customers. Awards, testimonials, and the like were how inward facing media sought to attract leads. That just isn’t enough anymore.

Test #3 – Finally, a human-to-human (H2H) connection has to be made for the business to pass the final test. This is where stories from direct experience with real customers are invaluable.

Showcase how your business helps its customers (with the focus on the customers, of course) and the intangible but vital qualities that humanize your business will communicate its one that people will enjoy working with.

Got a question or comment about any of this? Please leave a comment below and I’ll respond.

One more thing. Ryan has a new book on content marketing coming out this fall. You can get early access to it here.

Photo Credit

Love them or hate them, for many businesses competitive bids are unavoidable.

You know the ones. You have to send in a proposal, present your plan to a gathering of the great and good. Answer a bunch of tricky questions.

Here’s my experience:

You don’t win by doing great proposals. You don’t even win by doing great presentations.

You can lose by having a rubbish proposal and a rubbish presentation of course. And you can edge ahead when it’s neck and neck. But it’s unlikely that a brilliant proposal and presentation will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

You win in these competitive situations by going in ahead.

Having the odds stacked in your favour before the process starts.

Once someone thinks you’re the right person for the job, good old confirmation bias sets in. The evidence they then see that confirms you’re the right choice seems to stand out. The stuff that favours others gets ignored.

Doesn’t always happen that way. But it happens a lot. Enough to make a huge difference.

That’s why the guys who spend their time monitoring websites for news of the latest tenders they can bid on are usually the last to buy a round at the bar. Chances are they’ve lost before they even throw their hat in the ring.

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You don’t win competitive bids with great proposals and presentations. You win by going in ahead.
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How do you get ahead of the game?

You build relationships with key buyers way before they start looking to hire someone.

You can start that relationship in many ways.

You can target potential clients (think: Linkedin) and look for common connections to refer you in.

You can present your best material at events they’re likely to attend, or write articles in publications they read. Online and print. Or send them a copy of your book if you’ve got one.

You can do what I do and promote your content through targeted online advertising (note, I said promote my content, not my services).

Loads of ways. If you can’t find one you’re really not trying hard enough.

But that first connection’s not the tricky bit.

The tricky bit is following up, building that relationship.

More details on how to do that soon. For now, to summarise:

• The best way to win competitive bids is to start way out in pole position.
• The best way to do that is to establish credibility and trust with key buyers well in advance of them looking for help.
• To do that you’re going to have to work at it. Look exhaustively for avenues to connect. It’s not going to drop in your lap.

And please, please, please: don’t become one of those opportunity chasers who spends half their life writing proposals and responding to tenders and RFPs without winning anything but the worst of them.

The post Why Great Proposals Don’t Win You More Clients appeared first on Get More Clients: Proven Strategies to Attract and Win Clients.

Pop quiz: what does “The Sound of Music” have to do with pizza?

If you said “nothing,” you’re exactly right. But in December of last year, Kraft’s pizza brand DiGiorno Pizza live-tweeted ABC’s reproduction of the classic story. Their tweets ranged from all-caps jabs at the show and its characters to musical self-insertions (with “pizza” being the “self,” in this case). It was totally irrelevant. But it was also downright hilarious, which is probably why it earned the brand’s Twitter account thousands of favorites, retweets, and new followers.

CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN, FORD EVERY STREAM, FOLLOW EVERY RAINBOW, UNTIL YOU FIND A SUPREME (PIZZA FROM DIGIORNOOOOOO) #TheSoundOfMusicLive

— DiGiorno Pizza (@DiGiornoPizza) December 6, 2013

As of this writing, DiGiorno has more than 73,000 Twitter followers tuned in for, well, tweets about pizza. But the brand didn’t stop with musicals: it continues to live-tweet sporting events, wrestling matches, awards shows, and make pizza-related jabs at other pop culture topics. It’s funny, sure, but is it getting them any sales?

According to the social VP at Resource, DiGiorno’s agency, yes:

We’re seeing purchase intent go up. We see people post pictures of DiGiorno’s in their shopping carts to Twitter and Instagram saying they’re buying it because they follow us on Twitter. We’re starting to build the analytics.

Can humor or even downright irrelevance really result in not just increased social media engagement, but sales as well? Is “randomness” the key to standing out online and driving sales?

I’m going to argue no, but there is one very important thing all marketers and brand managers can learn from DiGiorno: if you want your online marketing to succeed, it needs to have meaning.

The Importance of Making Meaningful Connections

You can’t deny that DiGiorno’s Twitter account is hilarious. However, just because irrelevance and humor works for them doesn’t mean it’s a strategy that others should blindly adopt. For most brands, there are two problems with this strategy:

1. You don’t have thousands of dollars to hire a dedicated Twitter joke-teller, and
2. Even if you did, jokes about musicals, celebrities, and pizza have nothing to do with you.

For 99% of companies who engage with customers on social media, irrelevance is not an effective sales strategy, even if their target audience is similar to DiGiorno’s. It wouldn’t work for a luxury car brand, whose customers are expecting photos of cool cars, not jokes. In fact, Audi received quite a bit of user backlash for its #paidmydues campaign on Instagram, which had nothing to do with cars:

For most brands, being memorable involves making meaningful connections between what you do and how doing that can change someone’s life. Sean Kelly sums this up extremely well in his post “Recipes, Puppies, and Other Content that Has Nothing to Do With Your Brand”:

If you make cereal and someone shares the picture of a puppy you posted, they probably aren’t connecting that puppy to your brand. Your fans will connect more to your brand if you make cereal and you share a video that shows them how cereal can help them lead healthy lives.

Telling jokes and making your followers laugh is great. It makes you look more human and less like a robot or corporate mouthpiece. However, a photo of a puppy or a joke about pizza has nothing to do with you unless you sell dog toys or make frozen pizza. To put it simply, it’s going to be harder to drive actions with your marketing if the content you’re putting out there has little to nothing to do with your brand.

So how can you create these meaningful connections that make your followers remember you?

Appeal to Their Emotions

Good marketing appeals to your senses and emotions. In the case of DiGiorno, they appeal to your sense of humor. You could argue that humor is among the most effective marketing methods, if not at the very top of the list (see: Old Spice). But there have been some brilliant examples of emotional marketing in the last few years, many of which have been astonishingly effective.

For example, the ASPCA partnered with singer Sarah McLachlan to pair her heartwrenching song “Angel” with video clips of abused, neglected, or homeless animals. The resulting commercial was so upsetting that even McLachlan confessed to changing the channel when it aired. So how effective was it?

The campaign raised 30 million dollars for the ASPCA. Yes, you read that right.

Then there’s Purina’s “Great Dog” campaign, which began airing after the Westminster Kennel Club switched sponsors for its annual dog show (a move met with some criticism by longtime fans of the previous sponsor, Pedigree). With the theme “inside every good dog is a great dog,” this commercial also left viewers in tears — but in a good way.

In these two cases, puppies actually have a lot to do with the ASPCA and Purina’s marketing. But both of these companies know that posting photos isn’t enough. They set themselves apart from the pack by appealing to your emotions.

Chances are, you’re not going to remember the source of every puppy or kitten photo or commercial you see daily. But what you will remember is how you felt when you saw them. If you can make some kind of emotional connection to your target audience, you stand a much better chance at being remembered.

Personalize Your Messages

In February of this year, an Experian study found that personalized email — that is, email messages where the recipient’s name appeared somewhere visible in the subject line or body copy — resulted in transaction rates six times higher than email that had no personalization. This means that something as simple as changing your email’s first line from “Hi” to “Hi, Bob” could have a dramatic impact on the success of your email marketing.

Similarly, it’s been proven time and time again that email segmentation and more specific list targeting can drastically improve user response. MailChimp’s study on the effect of list segmentation found that sending more precisely targeted emails (based on information like location, previous engagement, specified interests, and so on) can improve open and click rates by an average of 14%.

Personalization is another way that you can make your marketing more memorable to potential customers. Although these tactics are typically applied a little further on in the sales funnel, by addressing your readers by name or sending them messages that are more targeted to their specific interests or habits, you’re showing that you care about them as an individual. No one wants to feel like “just another customer,” so don’t be afraid to employ personalization, even in very small ways, to combat that.

Do Something Unforgettable

Say you’re looking for a way to really “stick” in a customer’s head long-term. You want to be the first brand they think of when they need the products or services you offer — but you need to do it in such a way that your competition doesn’t stand a chance.

This is what TNT’s “Push to Add Drama” campaign did:

GoPro also does this on an ongoing basis by posting user-submitted videos and photos of those using its camera while diving, biking, skateboarding, or simply exploring the wilderness. They also have their own content, including this short visual story about “a bird and a fish,” which currently has over 6.5 million views. It was — you guessed it — shot purely with GoPro equipment.

Your marketing doesn’t have to be in video form to be unforgettable, though. There are some blog posts and content pieces that make brands memorable, whether or not they’re controversial or viewed as a “publicity stunt.” Just take Eat24′s breakup with Facebook, which resulted in increased visibility (the story made CNN), and apparently led to much higher engagement with the brand’s weekly coupon emails.

Is “breaking up” with a social media platform particularly meaningful? Probably not to anyone but Eat24′s social media team. But beyond that, from a marketing standpoint, it’s memorable. Eat24′s very public closure of its popular Facebook page got its name on the radar of new users, and effectively drove existing users from a platform where they weren’t seeing the updates they wanted (Facebook) to a place that they could (their inbox).

Whether or not Eat24 planned on their Facebook breakup being unforgettable, it certainly was, and now their name has staying power it didn’t have beforehand. Check out their site traffic below — note the bump in March and April (the breakup was announced on March 27, and news coverage lasted into mid-April).

Doing something with meaning, like donating money or planting a tree, usually isn’t enough. Your marketing needs to be unforgettable, to the point that people will start using your product name in place of a generic term (think Kleenex vs tissues, iPod vs MP3 player). This may not happen overnight, but it takes a bigger buy-in than settling for “just okay.” Think big and take chances.

Meaningful Marketing is the Key to Future Success

Let’s face it: consumers are savvier than ever. They know when they’re being sold to, and they sure as heck aren’t ready to commit to a long-term “relationship” with a brand on the very first encounter.

As time goes on, companies that aren’t able to make meaningful connections with members of their target audience are going to fall by the wayside. Businesses are now part of the “human era,” where companies who don’t think, talk, and act like human beings are overlooked for those that do.

So how can you engage in meaningful marketing, and make real, memorable, and long-lasting connections with consumers? Let’s recap and throw out some ideas:

• Avoid irrelevance. Unless your brand voice is already funny, don’t clutter your Twitter feed with jokes. Consider directly asking your customers what they’d like to see from you. Do they want more pictures? Video?
• Appeal to their emotions. Think about the emotions your products and services might inspire, and construct your messages around them. Does your software drastically simplify someone’s life? Will your product remove a child’s fear of the dark, or make parenting easier? Focus on the benefits first.
• Personalized messaging: Add a “first name” field to your signup forms, and use them to personalize your messaging. Test, test, test. Does adding your reader’s name in the email subject or body seem to increase clicks or conversions? Can you segment your emails to more precisely target your customers or potential leads?
• Do something memorable: You won’t stand out by doing the same thing as everyone else. Can you use your product or service to accomplish or produce something truly amazing, like the GoPro video? Maybe user generated content is your key to memorable (and inexpensive) content marketing.

Remember: you can (and should) start small. Try a few things, track the results, and see what works. Don’t go “all in” right away: in the end, only your customers will be able to tell you what is truly meaningful. Listen to what they have to say, and do what you can to be relevant to their interests and needs.

Although DiGiorno’s frozen pizzas have nothing to do with “The Sound of Music,” for this particular brand, humor and downright irrelevance are meaningful to its target audience. If a company can drive sales by live-tweeting a musical or crafting pizza puns, you can do it too. Think about what makes your company meaningful to your current and potential customers, and craft your story and marketing strategy around it.

At the end of the day, what works for you will be totally unique, and it might take a while to get there… but if you spend time working on it, the resulting meaningful marketing strategy will put you miles ahead of the competition.

Photo credit: Chris Blakely, Florian Seroussi (CC)

Looking for new talent for your firm? Consider using YouTube in your recruitment strategy. YouTube is on the top 5 most trafficked websites in the world, trailing Google and Facebook. YouTube is the second largest search engine trailing only Google (which happens to own YouTube). In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views, that’s 140 … Continue Reading

Looking For Talent? Why Not Use YouTube? by Laurianne Laval -Maximize Social Business

   

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Attracting consumers to your site is only the first part of your problem. Once they show up, why do you think they’ll buy what you’re selling?

You’ve baited the hook and caught your audience’s attention, but if the bait’s not tied to anything your conversions sink straight to the bottom.

Behavioral psychology has a lot to say about why we buy the things we buy and what the decision-making process looks like.

Knowing what your customers want or need to see from you will help you convert the traffic you already have, and ensure that the ones who get away eventually come swimming back to you.

If you understand your brand and your market, these five strategies can turn traffic into conversions.

1. Build your brand

The best visitor to your site is the one who arrives intending to buy. Raise awareness of your brand, not just your promoted products or services.

Find out what consumers think about you, and then emphasize the best parts and downplay the worst. This won’t happen overnight, but you plan to stay in business for a while, right?

Studies show that brand awareness is closely linked to perceived value. If what you’re offering is valuable, brand loyalty will follow.

When consumers know what to expect for your brand, they show up ready to commit to your product. The best thing you can do to prepare consumers to buy may be to step up your branding efforts.

2. Incentivize your offer

Like branding, discounts may seem basic, but research by Duke University and others suggest that the behavioral psychology behind incentives is too compelling to ignore.

Your high bounce rate may be attributable to shoppers not liking what they see on your site. But you’re probably also dealing with a fair number of strategic shoppers.

Strategic shoppers don’t just decide whether or not to buy, they wait for the right time to make the leap. Do you have a history of seasonal promotions? Understanding careful consumers will inform your inventory, supply chain, advertising and conversion rates.

Another benefit of incentives is that they make buying fun. The New York Times reports that when J.C. Penney eliminated sales in favor of everyday low prices, their strategy backfired catastrophically!

Many shoppers wait for promotions, so they can congratulate themselves on their shopping savviness. Incentivizing your conversions makes people feel good about their purchase, and it also boosts brand loyalty.  

Particularly in the travel industry, many companies like Groupon and Travel Zoo have found ways to exploit this theory of one-time prices.  

It creates a natural scarcity for trips that encourages impulse sales when the typical travel purchase decision would likely be much more thought out.  

Its success has even launched a seperate lead generation company Tera Data to drive continued sales for other travel partner sites such as Rohrer Bus Sales & Red & White Fleet Cruises.

 

3. Eliminate options

Behavioral psychology teaches us that decision-making is difficult for consumers. Psychologists know that too many choices, no matter how attractive, overwhelm shoppers. The same is true of multiple incentives.

It isn’t because customers are stupid, but it’s because they’re smart. We’re all trained to weigh the benefits of an incentive.

Calculating the worth of two or three discounted products, or two or three layers of incentive, slows us down and makes us wonder whether the product is worth the effort. Your overlapping new customer discount, bring-a-friend discount and seasonal discount may be smothering conversions. 

4. Get people talking

Is your brand social-friendly? Try incentives that get your customers talking about you. Dairy Queen incentivized its fan club and buy-one-get-one coupons with a Facebook contest. The promotion went viral and exceeded expectations by 20%!

If your brand doesn’t thrive on social media, there are other ways to incentivize word of mouth. Something as simple as a referral discount could double your reach among engaged or return customers. It may not be as sexy as a viral phenomenon, but we can’t all sell ice cream! 

5. Prepare your welcome mat

Your landing page is just as important as your shopping cart, and it probably gets a lot more visitors. Keep it in shape so all your great branding, promotion, and social ideas don’t bounce away with your visitors.

The best landing pages:

• Are barely there: like lingerie, the best landing pages don’t have much content.
• Show and tell: use high quality, compelling images and  straightforward messages.
• Look familiar: Include images from your social pages, brand logos, or other persuasive scents consumers expect.
• Make conversions easy: streamline complicated comparisons and decisions.

The payoff

The reward for your careful work is twofold. Obviously, you’ll ideally get the sale. Just as importantly, though, you gave the shopper an opportunity to talk about you, show you off, and lay the groundwork for others to enter the conversion funnel.

If the shopper made an easy decision to take advantage of a great offer tied to a brand he or she loves, others will too!

When it comes to sports passion nothing brings out the crazy in fans more than international competitions.

Now mix that with the biggest tournament for the world's most popular sport and we end up with a show in the stands at the World Cup that is nearly as entertaining as the matches being played.

Let's take a look at some of the fans with the craziest costumes and attire from the first six days of the World Cup.

Is that the invisible man?

Nobody will ever be as patriotic as this American fan.

This fan was very popular during the Ivory Coast matches.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Social media platforms rise and fall like monarchs, though some hold on to their power longer than others.  Facebook, for example, usurped Myspace and has held on to their position of power by using their wealth to buy more power.  This is not unlike many of the plot lines on the popular television show Game of Thrones.  Spoiler alert: if you’re not caught up on Season 4, stop reading now.

Facebook, much like the Lannisters, is the major power player in social media.  They used their power recently to acquire Instagram.  Much like the alliance between the Lannisters and Margaery Tyrell which blemished the reputation of “The People’s Queen”, the merger of Instagram into Facebook blemished its reputation.

Then there are the often forgotten social media sites, like Google+.  Though Google+ has only 3% of the market share of social media sites, it also boasts 300 million monthly active users.  That makes Google+ a potential sleeping giant, just like Petyr Baelish.

There are also large social media sites, like Tumblr, that are often mysterious and misunderstood.  Tumblr was recently acquired by Yahoo! for $1.1 billion and their active users increased by 74% in 2013.  This is analogous to the character Daenerys Targaryen, whose dragons most people don’t believe in.

For more about how the Game of Thrones relates to social networks, check out this infographic.  You might be surprised!

Brought to you by Social Marketing Software by Marketo

An immensely powerful strategy in copywriting is to use words and phrases that help to paint vivid pictures in the mind. When people can visualize the process of doing what you want them to do, including the enjoyment of the benefits of your offer, you also drive their actions.

I call them UPWORDS: “Universal Picture Words and Relatable, Descriptive Sentences.”

In other words, words and phrases that describe ideas the market can universally appreciate and relate to. That is, analogies, metaphors, action words, mental imagery, examples, testimonials, case studies, comparisons, colloquialisms, stories, etc.

Why?

Because the brain, according to Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, is a goal-seeking mechanism. If I told you not to think of a white flower, you would still think of one because I directed your mind by giving it a goal. But if I told you to think of a pink one, you would then not think of a white one.

In order to direct your readers’ actions, you must also direct their minds. Thus, use mental imagery and picture words that invite, entice, and incite.

Guide the mind and you guide the action.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, conversely copywriters know that a word can be a thousand pictures. So why not choose better words to paint more vivid pictures?

We think in relative terms. We are predominantly visual. Our brains have a tendency to translate messages into their visual equivalents in order to appreciate what they are being told. When someone says something, and if it’s something new or unfamiliar, we have a tendency to picture what is being said, and to do so unconsciously and extremely rapidly.

In plain English, the mind thinks in pictures, and not in words or numbers. Or as Mark Twain once noted: “Numbers don’t stick in the mind; pictures do.”

Research shows we remember visual images much easier and more effectively than words. Additionally, using mental imagery we take advantage of the brain’s inherent preference and therefore make it easier for it to not only remember information, but also believe in it and take action on it.

For example, if I told you to think of a garbage can, you’re not going to think of “G,” “A,” “R,” etc. You’ll visualize a garbage can. But here’s the kicker: The more I describe it to you as well as the more senses I engage in my description, the more realistic and concrete it becomes in your mind — including its color, smell, texture, dimensions, size, contents, etc.

Also, visualization helps to explain abstract or complex concepts. So convert abstract ideas into images by associating visual symbols that explain the concept through mental association or that has a similar meaning.

During a televised newscast, a reporter, flying over the scene of a forest fire in her station’s helicopter, was asked, “How big is the fire?” In a voice partially drowned by the whizzing sounds of helicopter blades, she said, “It’s over 140 acres of land, which is about 200 football fields back to back.”

Similarly, compel your readers not only with vivid picture words and mental imagery but also with stories, examples, analogies and metaphors that they can intimately understand and appreciate. Help your readers to paint the kinds of pictures you want them to paint.

The more vivid the words paint, the easier it will be for the mind to decode the message you are conveying into something your readers can understand, appreciate, relate to and, above all, act upon.

Scientifically, it’s also proven to increase sales. In a University study, researchers discovered that the more senses you engage, the greater the level of comprehension, retention, believability, and motivation. (This explains why video and multimedia outsells plain written copy, among others.)

If you simply replace vague words in a currently unproductive copy with words that are more vivid, forceful, and vibrant, you will invariably increase sales.

For example, you’re a financial consultant. Rather than saying something like, “Poor fiscal management may lead to financial woes,” say, “Stop mediocre money management from sucking cash straight out of your wallet!” (People can visualize the action of “sucking” better than they can “leading.”)

Instead of, “Let me help you maintain your balance sheet,” say, “Borrow my eyes to help you keep a steady finger on your financial pulse.”

Bottom line, think of analogies, metaphors, stories, or similes you can use to add color and life to your copy.

Source: MorgueFile, Sesame Street (1969)

The post Paint Your Copy With Pictures appeared first on Michel Fortin.

BERLIN – Media group Bertelsmann AG says it will shut down its book club business in the German-speaking world at the end of next year, closing a business that was once a driver of the company’s growth.

Bertelsmann’s DirectGroup unit said Tuesday it decided to close the book club business in Germany, Austria and Switzerland because it has become clear that “the club’s business model no longer has a sustainable economic perspective” in the regional market.

The company cited customers’ decreasing willingness to commit themselves to clubs and the “far-reaching change” in the book trade over recent years. In Germany, as elsewhere, online sales have eaten into traditional booksellers’ business.

The post Bertelsmann to shut German book club business, says model has no future in changing market appeared first on Canadian Business.

BERLIN – A cheap brand of Chinese-made smartphones carried by major online retailers comes preinstalled with espionage software, a German security firm said Tuesday.

G Data Software said it found malicious code hidden deep in the propriety software of the Star N9500 when it ordered the handset from a website late last month. The find is the latest in a series of incidents where smartphones have appeared preloaded with malicious software.

G Data spokesman Thorsten Urbanski said his firm bought the phone after getting complaints about it from several customers. He said his team spent more than a week trying to trace the handset’s maker without success.

“The manufacturer is not mentioned,” he said. “Not in the phone, not in the documentation, nothing else.”

The Associated Press found the phone for sale on several major retail websites, offered by an array of companies listed in Shenzhen, in southern China. It could not immediately find a reference to the phone’s manufacturer.

G Data said the spyware it found on the N9500 could allow a hacker to steal personal data, place rogue calls, or turn on the phone’s camera and microphone. G Data said the stolen information was sent to a server in China.

Bjoern Rupp, chief executive of the Berlin-based mobile security consultancy firm GSMK, said such cases are more common than people think. Last fall, German cellphone service provider E-Plus found malicious software on some handsets delivered to customers of its Base brand.

“We have to assume that such incidents will increasingly occur, for different commercial and other reasons,” said Rupp.

___

Satter reported from London.

The post German security firm: Chinese-made smartphone comes preloaded with spy software appeared first on Canadian Business.

Greg Hare, a veteran archeologist with the Yukon government, has been instrumental in assembling one of the finest collections anywhere of superbly preserved ancient hunting tools. Expounding on the trove of more than 200 artifacts stored in his Whitehorse lab, Hare might seem, with his scholarly manner and standard-issue khakis, all no-nonsense scientist. But ask him how hunters actually wielded these weapons, and he turns boyishly animated in his eagerness to demonstrate.

Pointing out an almost 5,000-year-old throwing dart that rests under glass in several painstakingly collected pieces, he reaches for an exact replica on a nearby shelf. He fixes one end of the slender, roughly two-metre-long willow dart into a notch in a wooden board that he grips in one hand. “It gives you an extension on your arm,” he explains, “allowing you to hurl this dart with great force and distance.” Hare heaves back, slow-motioning a throw, complete with a phwew sound effect at the point of release.

A short section of a dart shaft was the very first artifact found to launch the remarkable, ongoing saga of Yukon ice patch archeology. Back in 1997, a local husband and wife were hunting Dall sheep up in the southern Yukon mountains, when they smelled something barnyardy, and found that the odour was coming from a mound of melting caribou dung. The strange thing was that caribou hadn’t been seen in the area for many years. That led to a sequence of investigations, including radiocarbon dating of the dung and then that first fragment of a dart, and finally to a grasp on what was happening: Climate change was eating away at the edges of mountain ice patches, revealing droppings left by caribou herds thousands of years ago—and tools lost by the hunters who had once pursued them.

According to Hare, climate conditions on about two dozen Yukon mountains have proven to be almost uniquely suited to preserving organic material. Unlike glaciers that move, slowly grinding down any artifacts trapped in them, the Yukon ice patches tend to remain stable. Or at least they did, until gradual warming over the past several decades began to shrink them and reveal treasures. Among the finds: wooden darts as old as nearly 9,000 years, some complete with stone points, sinew bindings, bits of feather and traces of ochre decoration; a finely carved, barbed antler projectile point from about 1,200 years ago; and a size-four moccasin, 1,400 years old, amazingly intact, and believed to be a boy’s. “Some of it is very beautiful,” Hare says.

In the first years after those sheep hunters caught a whiff of something, the ice patch archeology project was soon organized around annual helicopter trips into the mountains. The window of opportunity is limited: Sometimes there is only one week every August, when the short Yukon summer has melted away the previous winter’s snow cover and perhaps exposed newly mushy portions of the old ice beneath. First Nations were partners from the outset, and Aboriginal field assistants often made key finds. But last summer’s search was cancelled entirely, when Yukon Native groups went to court to block a routine archeological permit. Rather than engage in a legal battle, the Yukon government withdrew the application. Neither the archeologists nor the First Nations leaders involved would explain the clash to Maclean’s, with both sides saying they’re close to finalizing a new memorandum of understanding.

Diane Strand, the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations’ heritage director and a key negotiator in the dispute, says she looks forward to bringing elders and young people from her community to work again with the archeologists this summer. “Going out on a patch, doing the work together, and then coming together around a campfire, that’s going to feel good,” Strand says. Hare has similar hopes. “In the early days, every time you found something it was a ‘Holy crow!’ moment,” he says. “But it’s been 15 years. My objective now is more than anything else to get young First Nations students up there experiencing being on the ice and having the opportunity of finding something.”

The post Melting Yukon ices reveals 5,000-year-old archaeological treasures appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Organizations worldwide are increasingly using design to drive growth and innovation. For the most part, this is good news: the influence of design has made products, services, software, and environments better, both for the customer and the bottom line. But there are still plenty of  companies that are getting design completely wrong, or at best, only partially right when it comes to making it an integrated business function. Here are four of the biggest, most common mistakes I’ve seen that sabotage efforts to integrate design into the corporation.

Tug of war management. When companies decide to add to their design headcount, particularly in management positions, there’s often an unintended consequence: A battle between the new hires and the non-designers who have gotten used to making de facto design decisions. This is particularly common in brand, supply chain, and R&D departments in large consumer packaged goods companies. This tug-of-war within the ranks is because the former decision-makers are reluctant to cede control — intentionally or because of deep-rooted norms and processes — undermining the point of hiring and involving designers in the first place. Corporate culture and design integrity, as well as brand equity, are often compromised in the process.

A notable example I witnessed was when a VP of R&D was bent on using a new machine technology that made ingredients inside a package look twisted like a chocolate and vanilla soft serve ice cream. Even though a design executive said the look was “wrong, wrong, wrong” for the beauty care brand equity she was trying to drive, her opinion was overridden and the product went to market anyway — no doubt at enormous expense.  The product subsequently underperformed and was taken off the shelf.

Leaving an empty seat at the table.  Some companies, like Microsoft, have hundreds of talented designers who have little influence over the company’s strategic direction for two major reasons: They are either incorrectly positioned in the organizational structure, or they are performing functions that don’t add the most value. In Microsoft’s case, design has never been at parity with other important business functions such as engineering and marketing. Consequently, the voice and influence of its designers has been muffled, leaving its business stakeholders as well as its customers scratching their heads why such a well-resourced and “smart” company can make such frustrating and unintuitive software, missing market windows time after time.

For design to be most effective in complex corporate environments, having a seat at the executive decision making table is critical. Strategic direction and its implications must be able to be discussed directly, and in real time, with the design leader who is responsible for bringing that direction to life. Sure, there is always a great deal of tactical design execution work in any large business, but keeping designers solely in the trenches as a service function erodes much of the value they can bring to a company.

The “toe in the water” phenomenon.  Some companies stop at second base when it comes to design. GE, for example, is making progress through greater investments in design. But its efforts have primarily focused on consumer-facing divisions such as health care and appliances, rather than fully embracing design as key business function across the entire firm. Most of the time equipment, control panels, and software in their industrial B2B divisions are still designed by engineers.

As user expectations for simple, intuitive interfaces are increasingly set by savvy consumer companies like Google and Apple, the view that design matters in some places but not in others isn’t going to cut it. By now, all types of customers have come to expect thoughtful design wherever they turn, and companies that don’t recognize this new reality are going to lose big time. Dr. Ralf Speth, CEO of Jaguar, captures the implication perfectly in his recent quote, “If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”

Yo-yo commitment. Becoming a design-centric company requires constant attention to driving a culture and environment that will support design, team building, and processes to accommodate design content. Due to design’s creative nature and special functional requirements, this takes time. A design executive I know who is reengineering his company’s design capability told his board recently he was embarking on “a marathon, not a sprint,” setting expectations that excellence in design does not happen overnight.

One of the worst things I’ve seen happen is that, for whatever reason, senior management gets excited about design and then suddenly reneges on its commitment, eliminating resources, killing momentum, scattering difficult-to-assemble talent and know-how in the process. HP, for example, drove a concerted effort at design capabilities development under ex-CEO Carly Fiorino, hiring design leadership, reengineering development processes, driving new brand standards, and developing tailored performance metrics. These efforts were decimated after several subsequent CEOs pulled the plug.

You can’t be a good design leader if you have to start from scratch every few years. Further, once a company has established a reputation for yo-yo commitment to design, it becomes increasingly difficult to hire talent who don’t want to chance having their efforts squandered, no matter how much they’re paid.

My prediction is that it will soon become clear to everyone, including Wall Street, that companies must have a grip on design to compete successfully. Imagine if, during a call, an analyst surprised your CEO by asking, “And what are you doing about design?” Your company can’t afford to have that question met with silence.

If you’ve jumped onto the content marketing bandwagon and kick-started a blog on your business website, you may have discovered that generating customers from your blog isn’t all as easy as you originally might have thought.

But never fear — just because your blog isn’t attract customers now doesn’t mean that it won’t in the future — all your blog needs is probably just a quick boost. So, here are 15 ways to boost your blog’s customer-generation.

1. Blog More Often

It’s been proven that the more often you blog, the more traffic you will be able to drive with it. Just make sure the quality of the posted content doesn’t suffer.

2. Include Call-to-Actions

A blog post without a call-to-action is a blog post wasted. Here’s how to craft a customer-generating CTA.

3. Use Images in Your Posts

Pictures speak a 1000 words — they also help to boost user engagement on blogs. With more images you can increase your blog visitors’ time-on-site and generate more customers.

4. Optimize for SEO

Google is the undisputed king of organic traffic. Make sure your blog conforms to their guidelines and is properly optimized.

5. Produce Higher-Quality Content

Sometimes, the only thing holding your blog back from more customers is simply a lack of quality content. Each post you publish should add value to the Internet.

6. Include Opt-in Boxes in Posts

Email marketing has a sky-high conversion rate. You can leverage your blog’s traffic to get more mailing list subscribers by putting opt-in boxes in between posts.

7. Be More Personal

Customers love buying from real people they like. Developing a strong personality and voice on your blog will help you appeal to them.

8. Make Your Headlines Compelling

Your headline is the most important piece of copy in a blog post. Make sure that each post title is compelling and sure to get a high click-through rate.

9. Improve Your Blog Design

The best way to make a good first impression on a customer is to look amazing. If you haven’t updated your blog design since the 90′s, it’s high time you did.

10. Use Buzzwords

Special buzzwords like “surprising”, “powerful”, “smart”, and “effective” make your blog content more shareable. Using them will help you get more customers from your blog’s social media marketing.

11. Use Google Authorship

Google Authorship helps you build rapport with your customers by showing your face in the SERPs next to your blog post listings. There are plenty of other reasons to use it, too.

12. Build Blog Authority

Make sure that your blog visitors know that you are an expert in the industry. High blog authority helps to dissipate any qualms visitors might have about buying from you.

13. Create Infographics

Infographics are very shareable and hugely popular on blogs. Leverage their traffic and customer generation power on your blog.

14. Create More Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that will still be relevant and educational years after it is posted. Center your blog around evergreen content rather than around current events.

15. Do Keyword Research

Your blog content should target keywords relevant to your business that will bring you customers. The first step in creating a successful blog is rigorous keyword research.

Which of these tips are you going to implement in your blog today? Which ones do you think are going to bring you the highest number of customers? Let’s hear your voices in the comments below!

When CEOs describe their company as being “like family,” we think they mean well. They’re searching for a model that represents the kind of relationships they want to have with their employees—a lifetime relationship with a sense of belonging. But using the term family makes it easy for misunderstandings to arise.

In a real family, parents can’t fire their children. Try to imagine disowning your child for poor performance: “We’re sorry Susie, but your mom and I have decided you’re just not a good fit. Your table-setting effort has been deteriorating for the past 6 months, and your obsession with ponies just isn’t adding any value. We’re going to have to let you go. But don’t take it the wrong way; it’s just family.”

Unthinkable, right? But that’s essentially what happens when a CEO describes the company as a family, then institutes layoffs. Regardless of what the law says about at-will employment, those employees will feel hurt and betrayed—with real justification.

Consider another metaphor—one that Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, introduced in a famous presentation on his company’s culture. Hastings stated, “We’re a team, not a family.” He went on to advise managers to ask themselves, “Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix? The other people should get a generous severance now so we can open a slot to try to find a star for that role.”

In contrast to a family, a professional sports team has a specific mission (to win games and championships), and its members come together to accomplish that mission. The composition of the team changes over time, either because a team member chooses to go to another team, or because the team’s management decides to cut or trade a team member. In this sense, a business is far more like a sports team than a family.

Consider what we can learn from the example of America’s winningest professional sports teams. In the National Football League, the New England Patriots have won three Superbowls since the turn of the century. Over the same time period, the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association have won three NBA championships (and a fourth in 1999), and the Boston Red Sox have won the World Series three times as well.

Each of these winning franchises has been able to build a consistent identity and a long-term relationship with its players—even though many of those players change from year to year.

An NFL team has 53 players on its roster. The only member of the current New England Patriots team that played on their first championship team is quarterback Tom Brady.

A Major League Baseball team has 25 players on its roster. The only member of the current Boston Red Sox team that played on the 2004 World Series champions is designated hitter David Ortiz.

The Spurs stand out for the stability and longevity of their player relationships, yet even their current 13-man roster only includes one player from their first championship in 1999: power forward Tim Duncan.

The reason these teams have been able to remain consistent winners despite high personnel turnover is that they have been able to combine a realistic view of the often-temporary nature of the employment relationship with a focus on shared goals and long-term personal relationships.

While a professional sports team doesn’t guarantee lifetime employment for its players—far from it–the employer-employee relationship still benefits when it follows the principles of trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory. It is no coincidence that these teams are known for “The Patriot Way” or “The Spurs Way,” and that television broadcasters often praise them for “unselfish” play.

And paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for individual team members to achieve success. The members of a winning team are highly sought after by other teams, both for the skills they demonstrate and for their ability to help a new team develop a winning culture. Both the Patriots and Spurs have supplied numerous other teams with veteran leaders and coaches. For example, five of the other 29 NBA teams have a former Spurs assistant as their head coach. Meanwhile, the New York Yankees’ habit of signing former Red Sox as free agents is so well known that it is now a common punchline among baseball writers.

Great sports teams also find ways to maintain their relationships with former players, even long after their departure or retirement. For example, Spurs alumni who are now working as television broadcasters still regularly have dinner with the team and its coaches, even though they might not have played with the team for over a decade. Do you think that current players, seeing that kind of loyalty, might want to play for the Spurs?

Of course, a professional sports team isn’t a perfect analog to your business. It’s doubtful, for example, that you obtain the bulk of your employees by taking turns with your competitors as part of an organized talent draft. But a great sports franchise consistently brings together a disparate team to achieve a common goal despite the reality of staff turnover. That’s something all businesses should strive for.

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Be Quick or Be Dead — What B2B Buyers Expect When They Submit Your Contact Forms

Clearly, the web has become a critical part of the buying process, and the emergence of mobile and tablets further influence the radical change in how buyers move forward. Zogby Analytics, a spin-off from the famous Zogby political polling firm, recently studied customer expectations online when purchasing significant products, services, or solutions. They came up with some interesting results. (http://www.slideshare.net/digitalinsurance/velocify-online-buyer-expectations)

For a start, look at what happens with the “contact us” section of virtually every website. The Zogby study found that 70% of business buyers have had business inquires ignored. Responses often take a few days or fail to answer questions correctly. If you ask about bus service to Chancellorsville, you don’t want to be told that a company does not go to Charlottesville.

People do not like to have to say “please sir, take my money.” Business buyers do considerable research before they engage with your sales team. They already have some information, probably about other companies as well as yours. Roughly two-thirds of business buyers have spent three hours or more doing research. The same percentage has used mobile devices for at least some of their research. At least some of these buyers will use mobile devices for their inquiries. If your website cannot be clearly read on a mobile device as well as a laptop or desktop, fix your website.

Potential business buyers have usually checked out other firms — frequently three or more — so it is very much in your interest to send them a rapid answer. A majority want an answer within 24 hours. An overwhelming majority want a response within 48 hours.

Three quarters of business survey respondents said the first company to respond has a sales advantage. Fewer than 2% thought being first would be a disadvantage. So, we can assume that there is little disadvantage, and more potential, in responding to an inquiry quickly and accurately, setting the bar for the sale.

Answer their questions by the method or methods they prefer — ask them and listen to what they say — e mail, phone, mobile media, carrier pigeon, even snail mail. You can be persistent and send a follow-up response; but don’t overdo it. Spamming a person does not mean a company cares.

The business world is becoming more and more competitive. Sales are even more competitive. You have to convince customers not only to like your product but to like you and your company. A major part of effective sales is to relate your product or service to the client’s needs. You cannot relate to the client unless you communicate with the client, starting with a timely and accurate answer to the potential client’s initial inquiry. If you are selling something, a slow, inaccurate, or rude response is going to make the client wonder, “If this is what they are like before the sale, how will he or she be after the sale?” A polite, and quick, response, even if it does not earn the sale, leaves a good taste in the mouth of the potential client. They may seek you out in the future. They may comment favorably if a friend at another company asks about you. On the other hand, seeming not to care enough at least to answer initial questions is a very bad start to what you want to be a good business relationship.

As a seller, you have to adapt to the new world — of speed and of a lot of choices. Ticking off clients runs a major risk of losing the sale and tarnishing your brand. People are not going to want to beg you to take their money. Potential customers expect speed, courtesy, accuracy, and signs of interest in them from the start. Buyers are looking for partners, not just vendors and suppliers. Give them what they ask for.

Remember that you need customers more than they need you.

 

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The post Be Quick or Be Dead — What B2B Buyers Expect When They Submit Your Contact Forms appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

 It was just in April that Clari — a mobile-first sales tool that uses data science and predictive analytics to help sales people do their jobs — emerged from stealth with $6 million in backing from Sequoia. Today the company is announcing another funding milestone: a Series B round of $20 million. Andy Byrne, the company’s founder and CEO, says Clari plans to use the funds… Read More