My Foursquare Experiment...

Credit: dpstyles™'s Flickr photostream I recently upgraded to the HTC Incredible Android phone on Verizon. With that came a flurry of new online activity for me (just isn’t the same on a Blackberry). One of those is Foursquare.  I enjoy sharing professionally, which includes blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but am more reluctant when it comes to my personal life.  Foursquare has much more personal application for me than professional, so I was definitely stepping out of my social media comfort zone. I believe location based services such as...

The Marketing Sandpile...

In reading The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo, one of the central themes of this book is Per Bak’s Sandpile effect. In an overly simplified explanation, the sandpile effect draws an analogy between the unmappable and invisible interconnections between global events and the complex relationship between individual grains of sand as they are piled on top of each other.  Each time a grain is added to the pile, the relationship between each grain is altered.  The experiment tries to determine how many grains will it take before the sandpile collapses. ...

5 Ways To Make Your Members Feel at Home...

Christopher Uschan of Omnipress and the main force behind Engage365.org, an online community for using social media at events, wrote a great post outlining 5 ways to introduce new members to your online community.  Many of us that run online communities often times forget about some of the basics.  And one of the reasons this post caught my attention is David Meerman Scott makes the analogy that the internet is like a city, and social media sites (among many others in his analogy) are like bars or cocktail parties.  Christopher’s post dives a bit deeper into the...

Tapping into New York Nostalgia Through ...

I grew up towards the end of the New York Street Games era, and I remember playing each and every one of them. My favorite was skelly and handball, and this movie really brought back fond memories of my youth and growing up in New York. I took this opportunity to ask the producer of New York Street Games, Craig Lifschutz, a couple questions about their marketing efforts and how they could tap into the passion and fondness of the experiences many New Yorkers have around these games. This movie presents a great opportunity for you to reach New Yorkers all over the world,...

What is the Human Element?...

For my last post, we had a great conversation in the eMarketing Association group on LinkedIn, and Jaime V. pointed out something overlooked often by marketers. The Human Element. It is somewhat contrary to my last post on metrics and measurement, and what you can’t measure is the sentiment of a post. Credit: Okko Pyykkö on Flikr Nomad Marketer just wrote a post on 6 tips on Twitter that talked about some of this. Specifically, point 4, 5, and 6 deal with this type of sentiment [4. Look for user experiences, 5. Learn why negative words are coming up, 6. Learn about...

Is social media worth measuring?...

Credit to Orange_Beard on Flickr. A great marketer I used to work with, Tabor Ames, VP of Marketing at PQ Media, once told me that any marketing initiative is not worth doing unless you can measure it.  Now that presents me with a problem.  Much of what I do [and I'd imagine you too] is measured on traffic, membership, registrations, and many other kinds of conversions. But how do you measure online community engagement? The impact these conversations are having on an email you send a month from now? A year? Is anyone listening? This topic is at the center of one of my...

Help Me Find a New Job Title Challenge...

So, as online and social media marketing continue to evolve, so should I and my role.  I was brought into IQPC as the Director, Online Community and Portal Development.  The leadership at IQPC had a vision and I was fortunate to take part in the development of this new division. In just shy of 2 years we’ve launched 8 portals and reached over 2 million people. An example of one these portals is in the customer management and call center space where we cover industry leaders such as Zappos. But now I feel my role has evolved from launching these online portals and...

Marketing is a Scam!...

At least that is what our customers think way too often, especially about our email marketing.  There is always this defense mechanism that pops up when a consumer is exposed to some sort of Marketing.  As a marketer, we need to quickly breakdown that wall and convey to a prospective customer the true value of what we are selling (and we’re all selling something). How do we do that? How do we build trust in a split second? Speak to the person, not at them. Demonstrate the value quickly. Don’t go on and on about how great you are. It’s about...

7 Ideas to Boost your Email Marketing Ca...

As B2B media companies, we are pretty much the experts when it comes to direct email marketing.  But over the years, we’ve seen the performance of our programs decline year over year, ever so slightly. A wise man once said, “the sign of true insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect different results.”  Looking at email campaigns over the years, they look different (pictures and buttons), but are they really? The one constant on mine when I first started was Register Here! Here are 7 things you can try and not go...

‘D’ is for Digital…But...

In a recent HBR post, they discuss the how digital marketing is evolving.  One comment even goes as far as creating a Digital Marketing Officer! At my previous organization, there was a major ‘e’ initiative really driving the organization to look at online as a core marketing and operational channel.  This post talks about ‘D’ for digital.  What ever you prefer to call it, digital has changed the face of marketing forever.  But, how much should we separate the ‘D’igital from the ‘T’raditional? Digital is no longer about...