As an example, I try to do this on a daily basis with the blog. When I notice that their are a lot of Facebook likes but not a lot of Twitter retweets, I’ll push it out there again. If I see a ton of reaction via Twitter and Facebook, I’ll push it to StumbleUpon. When I see the topic grow significantly, I’ll write more about that topic, perhaps schedule a Marketing Tech Radio show about it, or even plan a video.

One tactic that I’ve seen really work on the blog is the addition of a variety of marketing infographics. The site has grown between 10% and 15% over the last couple months with the additional feature. As a result, we’ve got alerts set up for them and we’re now engaging graphic designers to develop our own. The latest one on how mobile is impacting ecommerce was an idea I had after reading a whitepaper… so we didn’t even have to do the research!

Momentum is key to a lot of cross-channel marketing, so the longer your can prolong a popular strategy, the better the overall results of your campaigns. We don’t just see this online, we see it off-line as well. If a commercial resonates with the audience… like Flo, the Progressive Lady, we see a series of commercials with the Progressive Lady.

It’s not just in marketing, either. It’s a fact of life that we need to cut the bad and prolong the good. I need to cut my eating habits and learn how to prolong my exercise. In work, I need to cut clients who aren’t listening to us or getting results, and work harder on prolonging the relationship with the companies who do listen and are successful.

Back to marketing.

Many companies are so familiar and comfortable with some marketing efforts that they simply don’t cut them… even when they’re failing. I think it’s a natural mechanism by marketers who become very comfortable with the medium. Their minds are simply closed to alternatives. Email marketers lean on email, search marketers lean on search, paid advertising marketers lean on ads… it’s a vicious circle that inevitably ends up in failed campaigns and lots of lost revenue.

On the contrary, many marketers don’t pay attention to analytics and don’t even realize what’s working or what’s not. They don’t prolong any of their efforts across channels. Each campaign starts from scratch without a care in the world. This makes them unable to capitalize on the momentum they already had put in place.

Social media offers us a means of prolonging every campaign. As David Murdico I spoke about video marketing strategies on the last radio show, we spoke about how incredible it is to already have a set of fans and followers in place. As you grow your social network of fans and followers, you’re investing in the success of your next campaign and your overall marketing strategy.

In essence, that investment in a social following is prolonging your next campaign… before you ever planned it’s execution! If you have 100,000 followers in place that are listening and have provided you with permission to contact them, how would that change your next marketing campaign? I hope it’s something you’re thinking about.

You are focusing on your website, your finances, your employees, your customers, and your brand and hoping you can make good decisions every time.

Unfortunately, with all the directions small business owners are pulled, it can be difficult to put enough time and attention into branding. However, branding is one of the most important aspects or your business and can have a great deal to do with the first impression you give your prospective customers.

A big component of a first impression is how you answer the phone when a prospect calls your business. Many small businesses try to get by on the cheap with a less-than-professional phone system and unfortunately this can damage first impressions. Here are some things I see a lot that can be problematic.

1. Using your cell phone number as your business phone number. Even if you are a solopreneur, this is not a good idea. Everybody can tell when they are calling a cell phone, especially when it goes to voice mail and gives a standard mobile voicemail greeting. It gives an amateurish impression to callers and signals that you are a one-man shop. There is nothing wrong with being a one-man shop but drawing attention to it in this way is not ideal.

2. Answering the phone with “hello?” and nothing else. If I’m calling a business, I expect the person answering the phone to say the business name followed by a professional greeting. If I’m calling a direct line or have just been transferred, it’s fine to leave out the business name but I would expect to hear the person answer by name. It’s professional courtesy and helps set the right tone for a business conversation.

3. A “general” voice mail box. When you call a business and no one answers, do you sometimes get a “general” voice mail box and no other options? Do you trust that leaving a message will result in a response? Neither do I. First off, get a receptionist (or a good virtual receptionist service). The best case scenario is that callers will get a real person every time. If you don’t have a receptionist, at least offer an auto-attendant that will let the caller find the right person to leave a message for.

4. A line that does not accept voice mail. This is even worse than the “general” voice mail box. Occasionally when I call a business and no one answers, I will be sent to a greeting that tells me not to leave a voice mail because it will not be checked. Really? This is just plain rude. Everyone is busy and if I have to make time to call back in hopes of reaching someone, I’m likely to move on. I’ve found that medical offices are frequently guilty of this.

5. A cheap VoIP service. Voice over IP is great and has come a long way. However, it can still cause some issues in voice quality and can create a noticeable delay in two-way conversation, as well. For this reason, it’s not ideal to rely on Skype, Google Voice, or other free services for primary business lines. If you’re going to go the VoIP route, it’s better to invest in a professional VoIP solution that will give you clear audio and reliability. Few things are more frustrating than trying to close a business deal while struggling to communicate with your customer over unreliable phone lines.

It doesn’t take much effort to create a professional phone experience for your callers but it can make a big impact on the first impressions they have when calling. At SpinWeb, we’ve found that a great team of receptionists + iPhones works well for us. It pays to think about how professional your business sounds when someone calls.

However, one of the most difficult aspects of blogging can be getting ideas. Blog ideas can come from many sources, including customer interactions, current events, and industry news. However, another great way to get blog ideas is to simply use Google’s new instant results feature.

The way to use this is to start typing in keywords that are related to your industry, and then see what Google fills in for you. For example, lets say you run a food blog and you are looking for ideas. Here are some examples of searches you could do:

By simply typing “eating out” on the search box, you are presented with some long tail keyword options that could turn into blog topics. Here is another example:

By simply starting your search with “food”, you get some instant ideas that can turn into great titles. For example:

• “Food network recipes: what they don’t tell you on TV”
• “Food pyramid guidelines: an interview with three local nutrition experts”

By starting your blog title with these search terms, you are aligning your blog topic with phrases that people are actually searching on, which increases your chances of being found via a Google search.

If you get stuck and can’t come up with a topic for your next blog, head over to Google and throw some words at it that are related to your industry. You may find some great ideas that could also improve your SEO.

Can’t can mean a lot of things. Can’t can be due to resources, regulations, education or authority. When you haven’t accomplished a goal because it can’t be done, you haven’t failed… something got in the way. Once you remove the roadblock, you’ll succeed.

Won’t is different. Won’t leads to failure. Won’t happens because of fear, arrogance, pride, laziness or miscommunication. Won’t means that the goal was possible, but someone got in the way.

In my early days as a manager, I was always challenged with the question of can’t versus won’t with my employees. Not knowing whether the issue was a can’t or a won’t made me dig deeper with the employee to find out why we didn’t succeed.

I was often surprised to find employees that wanted to succeed, but couldn’t because of some third party interference. Sometimes I was surprised because I was the something in the way. Once we removed the interference, we always got the win.

When the goal wasn’t met because of won’t, the process was much different. These were employees that needed to be removed because they were the interference and the roadblock to success.

The story doesn’t change with companies. There are companies that can’t and those are our ideal clients. We can provide them with the resources, strategy and education and help them break through. Unfortunately, we’re also met with companies who won’t. They won’t listen, they won’t change, they won’t apply the necessary resources, or they won’t because they think they know better.

We can’t help companies that won’t.

It seems that I’m not the only one. This is a great presentation from Dan Pink from the RSA on motivation.

What really motivates a cognitive employees is:

• Autonomy – the ability to have ownership and make your own decisions.
• Mastery – the opportunity to master a talent or skill.
• Purpose – put someone in a position where they actually make a difference.

So… save your money and stop alienating your employees. In marketing, I see so many business leaders interfering with their marketing department’s success… actually hurting it or destroying it altogether. Get out of the way and give your employees the opportunity to drive the results you want them to attain. Show them the goal line and motivate them with the opportunity to actually transform your business. (Note: I found this on Compendium’s Facebook page).

The reason I disagree with Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook’s chief operating officer referenced in the article) is because no one seems to talk about how communication habits change as we get older. The typical argument behind the “email is dead!” bandwagon is that the younger generation does not use email because they are on Facebook instead. While that may be true, let’s fast-forward 5 years. Right now, that 17-year-old is probably not on email as much as Facebook. However, what happens when that same person is now 22 and is looking for a job after graduating from college? How will she communicate with potential employers? Probably email. When she lands a job, what is one of the first things she will receive? Probably a company email account.

What we’re also forgetting is how tightly email is still integrated into the authentication process on various websites. How do you log into Facebook? With your email account. Many websites use email as a username and all of them require an email address to register. Email is still the universal inbox for many people and will remain so.

Will the next generation communicate differently than today’s professionals? Absolutely. Will they stop using email and conduct all business over Facebook? I doubt it. Email is still fast, efficient, proven technology. Great email marketing firms like Indy’s ExactTarget know this and are seeing fantastic results from utilizing email as a marketing medium. At SpinWeb, our own email newsletter is a significant component in our communication strategy.

Let’s stop jumping on the “email is dead!” bandwagon and instead learn better ways to use it effectively. I would love your comments below.

WordPress is Optimized for Search Engine Optimization.

I don’t know how you optimize for optimization or what that even might mean. As a content management platform, WordPress enables optimization, but it’s largely up to you, your WordPress theme and your WordPress plugins to fully optimize your WordPress site or blog.

In my humble opinion, there are four elements to outstanding search engine optimization:

1. Enabling SEO best practices with your platform, like robots.txt, pings, and XML sitemaps. WordPress actually doesn’t do any of this out of the box… you’ll need to create your robots.txt file, enable pinging to the appropriate sources, and add a sitemap generator.
2. Optimizing your theme, ensuring page elements are properly placed and the site is organized hierarchically, ensuring that pages are promoted correctly internally. Many theme designers ignore the importance of elements like page titles and headings. Some construct the page and put the sidebar content before the page content in the layout. A well-designed theme can substantially improve how search engines view your content and what terms they index your content for. Most businesses also start up a blog and don’t give thought to how to organize their content categorically and through their navigation. This can cause issues, especially if you have a wide selection of keywords to target.
3. Optimizing your content through the use of keywords that you know will both attract and convert visitors into customers on your site. This is done as part of an overall blogging package by companies like Compendium, but WordPress lacks any service or tools to do this. You will still need to do the analysis by yourself and use a tool like Scribe to help (Scribe for WordPress demo video).
4. The overall irony of SEO is that most of what you do on the site doesn’t really impact your ranking as much as what you do off-site. Writing fantastic, relevant content that gets the attention (and backlinks) of other sites can subsequently get you ranked well. But that doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress and more to do with how well you promote your blog posts, syndicate your blog in social media, and promote it through comments and other mechanisms. Understanding where to promote your blog and promoting it effectively will do more for your search engine ranking than your platform!

Lastly, SEO is not a single event, a checklist or a project. Since your competitors (and the entire Internet) is constantly changing and Google continues to adjust its algorithms daily, your ranking will continue to change. Registering your site with Google Webmasters, Bing Webmasters and Yahoo! Site Explorer, monitoring rank with tools like Authority Labs and SEMRush is an ongoing process that you need to incorporate to ensure you’re truly optimized.

SEO is the process of monitoring your ranking and making the necessary adjustments to ensure your content is being found and ranked well for the terms that help your business grow.

That’s my definition!

Here’s the rule:

Fast, cheap or good: Pick any two.

The purpose of this rule is to remind us that all complicated endeavors require tradeoffs. Whenever we have a gain in one area there will undoubtedly be a loss somewhere else. So what does fast-cheap-good mean for readers of the Marketing Technology blog? Let’s go with everything.

The Meaning of Fast, Cheap and Good

We all have a sense of speed. It’s race weekend here in Indianapolis, and the fastest car wins. No matter what project you’re trying to accomplish, whether it’s mowing the lawn or traveling to the moon, we all want it done as soon as possible.

Of course, sometimes speed isn’t everything. Some of the best vacations are those where we linger. Some of the most successful products are those where the designers didn’t worry about getting to market first but doing better work. And often, rushing is wasteful of resources. After all, the Indy cars only get 1.8 MPG.

And sure, it’s great to save money. You can call upon an army of volunteers and interns to try to produce something, and often receive surprising results. Yet by reducing costs we also risk sacrificing quality. Searching for all of those places to save takes time. Ultimately, the way to have the best possible result is to ensure that time and money are no object. The highest quality work is always available when we have infinite resources at our disposal.

Fast, Cheap, Good and Productivity

This rule of thumb sometimes seems a little obvious. We all know there are tradeoffs in any project. Yet, as Doug Karr just pointed out, project estimation is painful. That’s because clients will constantly put us in the trap of trying to deliver something which is fast, cheap and good all at the same time.

This is impossible. It’s the reason that deadlines slip, projects go over budget and quality suffers. You have to make tradeoffs.

No matter the size of the project, the fast-cheap-rule is valuable. If you’re a graphic designer working in Photoshop, you can save time by not keeping your layers separate and organized. If you’re trying to cut costs on your email marketing, you can sacrifice quality by trying to do it in house (or sacrifice urgency by using a outsourced email marketing provider.) If you don’t mind a few typos in your article, you will benefit by producing it more quickly and inexpensively. The tradeoffs are easy to see.

In your own office, you can use the fast-cheap-good rule for more than just making decisions. You can also use it for communicating between stakeholders. When people ask for a work to be done immediately, you can ask them if they would prefer to sacrifice quality or pay for increased costs. If someone wants to know about less expensive options, ask them if they would rather see options that connect savings to fewer features or to a longer development cycle.

You get the idea. Use fast-cheap-good! It’s a powerful way to understand the nature of project management, productivity and stakeholder interaction.

Managed email marketing can take many forms, such as the crafting and management of recurring email communications.

It could also involve content development, cross-channel distribution, list growth, as well as untold technical integrations and reporting mechanisms. The list is long.

In any case, when our clients come to us requesting managed email services it’s largely because they’re frustrated and frugal.

Frustrated Marketers

They’re fed up. They can’t find qualified in-house talent or siphon additional production (or ability) from their existing staff, yet they know they could and should be doing so much more.

That’s common. In many ways email marketing is a unique discipline. Email is hard. But in other ways it simply requires talent and tenacity. It’s difficult to find both of those requirements in a single source or an overworked and under-trained team.

Outsourcing works because it allows marketers to tap into the diverse, yet specialized, skillsets of their partner…be they an email marketing agency or an ESP.

Besides creativity, technical skills, and powers of persuasion (all of which are required if you’re going to win the email game), an email marketing partner also brings with them the experiences of working with a varied client base. This is a limitless source for fresh ideas which ensures that the effort does not become a victim of “group think” and that every dollar spent is maximized.

Frugal Marketers

When deciding to outsource their email marketing or keep it in-house, many of our clients first looked at the dollars to see if it makes sense. They’re frugal not stupid.

Let’s face it, email marketing services takes time. So, in one form or another, time is the source of the marketer’s expense.

That’s one of the reasons why outsourcing makes sense; it takes less time.

Because of the experience that your email services partner brings to the table, there is little to no learning curve, as it pertains to their capabilities. They also feel the need to prove their value, every month.

I can’t speak for all agencies but we’ve spent months with our faces buried in almost every ESP’s interface and API. We know their strengths, weaknesses, and limitations.  We have crafted thousands of campaigns and provided consulting services to many many B2C and B2B marketers. This creates an efficiency that is only gained through experience. Efficiency means less time, which means less cost.

Besides efficiency, continuing education becomes the expense of the service provider. Payroll expenses, medical, vacation time? Fugetaboutit.

The cost is usually less than that of a full-time staffer, or depending on the requirements, even greater cost savings can be found. Again, it all backs out to time.

If they outsource, what kind of ROI can the marketer expect? There is  only one way to find out: initiate a conversion and choose wisely. It may pay huge dividends to find a partner that can work in concert with them or their in-house teams, or maybe they’d like to outsource the entire email marketing effort, soup to nuts.

Scott spoke to ExactTarget’s goal of being the Marketing Hub for companies. Instead of simply being a send engine for email, ExactTarget is pushing to be the database of record for many of its clients with the following goals:

1. Data Aggregation and Accessibility – through a comprehensive API, robust data extensions and secure, robust infrastructure, it’s possible now for companies to host and utilize ExactTarget as a secure, compliant source for storing their clients’ data.
2. Rules for Relevance – because ExactTarget delivers messages via email, voice, SMS and social media, behavioral data can be captured, stored and utilized to improve the relevance of the messaging for those customers.
3. Delivery of Communication – ExactTarget has the fastest outbound mail management systems in the industry and their OEM model is exploding because of the system’s performance. Added to this is Voice, SMS and, after the purchase of CoTweet, perhaps social media messaging.
4. Measurement Over All – ExactTarget is looking to complete the circle by supplying robust measurement over all outbound communication.

Storing data was largely seen as natural for Software as a Service Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services, but other industries are now moving in this direction. Analytics provider, Webtrends, has launched their Visitor Data Mart, allowing for powerful drag and drop segmentation that’s built directly in the product. Webtrends has a superior REST API and, coupled with a leading Analytics engine, hosting your customer database with Webtrends provides sophisticated marketers with some powerful tools to target and measure communications.

Database as a Service launched a couple years ago with providers like Amazon and Google offering simple relational databases hosted in the cloud. That’s all well and good, but without the applications to leverage that data, the industry really hasn’t had the mass adoption like people thought it would. The advantage that companies like ExactTarget and Webtrends have is that they have proven communication and analytics products already in place over the DaaS.

Although all of these providers have strong integrations with one another, it seems more and more they’re going to be competing to become the primary source of customer data. Ecommerce, CRM, Email and Analytics providers are all going to be pushing to become the database of record and all will be soon be offering services to store your data, provide robust messaging and analytics for your data. He who owns the data owns the client – so SaaS providers pushing to become Database as a Service providers is going to explode in the next year. This is a great strategy for SaaS providers since migrating or leaving your provider becomes much more difficult once they’re hosting your database!

The CMS Expo is a learning and business conference devoted to Content Management Systems and website services. It features a number of tracks centered around business and technology themes. The five tracks at this year’s conference were Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Plone, and Business. I’m still working on getting them to feature my favorite CMS next time. The first four tracks were specifically focused on the respective CMS featured while the business track covered marketing, research, best practices, social media, and other business-specific topics.

I gave two presentations for the business track: “7 Habits of Highly Effective Websites” and “Twitter for Business“. Both went very well and got great feedback. It was a great crowd and I had lots of excellent questions and discussion.

Here is what I liked about the CMS Expo:

• Everyone was extremely friendly and outgoing
• The speakers were great
• The conference website was very useful and well done
• The facility (Hotel Orrington) was excellent
• The organizers really put on a great event with lots of networking
• It is expensive, which means higher-quality businesses in attendance (yes, I liked this)

The only thing I didn’t like so much was the fact that everything tended to run late so I had to cut both of my sessions a little shorter but this was a fairly minor issue.

I attended some great sessions on Google Analytics and market research and had a great time meeting new people. Those who are more interested in technical tracks, especially related to one of the feature open-source CMSs, would find the material very valuable. I poked my head into a few of these sessions and also noticed lots of positive Twitter chatter about these tracks. Many of the speakers at the CMS Expo were original founders and developers of some of the CMSs represented.

The attendance at the 2010 CMS Expo was around 400 and and it also included a full group of great exhibitors who did a fantastic job of marketing themselves and contributing to the environment. They were even giving away iPads! I was also interested to see so many speakers and attendees from far away places, including France, and Norway.

The climate of the conference was definitely one of fun, learning, and helping others and it was a pleasure to be a part of it. John and Linda Coonen (CMS Expo founders) did a wonderful job and I look forward to next year’s event.

If you work in marketing and/or technology, consider attending next year’s CMS Expo. It will be well worth your time.