Techno//Marketer - Matt Dickman on Digital Marketing and Social Technology

MySpace Strives to Recover Its Cool [del.icio.us]

2009-10-15T09:21:35-07:00

Interesting move, but is it too late? MySpace still is the leader in music, but can they get traction again?

Where you at, Matt?

2009-10-15T11:09:50-04:00

A number of you have noticed that I have been scarcely around the blog and Twittersphere over the past couple of months. I have a lot going on and wanted to step back and gather my thoughts. I just wanted you to know that I am not gone, I am just on a short hiatus. I have a couple of big announcements coming up as well as a little branding overhaul for Techno//Marketer.

Long story short, I'm going to be back soon, better than ever (I hope), so thank you for reading and I'll be back in the conversation with you very soon.

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Technorati Tags: Matt Dickman

Facebook Connect Goes Mobile [del.icio.us]

2009-09-04T06:54:12-07:00

Facebook is extending its Connect data portability technology to developers of mobile sites and applications, following its launch six months ago for iPhone developers, the company announced Thursday in an official blog.

Want better digital strategy, ban seven dirty words

2009-08-08T17:13:49-04:00

If you love strategic planning as much as I do then I am sure that one of your biggest pet peeves is when people jump to tactics straight away in a planning meeting. Despite your most desperate attempts to steer things back on course, and define what the overall strategy looks like, you die a little when someone blurts out "Let's set up a YouTube channel and Tweet about it!".

How do you get around this? Here is what I have started doing in my initial planning sessions and it seems to be working well so far. I've banned what I consider the seven dirty words of digital strategy. They are:

Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
MySpace
LinkedIn
Flickr
Ning

Why are they so bad? Because it allows people to jump to a tactic without thinking about brand essence, audience, voice, etc. It also takes attention away from a more integrated digital approach (email, loyalty programs, SEM, etc.). The pure hype behind these seven words has turned mass media and corporate boardrooms on their heads trying to figure out how to best leverage them.

So, the next time you walk into a planning meeting, lay out your list of dirty words and create a penalty for anyone who mentions them. You'll be surprised how quickly your discussions turn to audience, engagement and how fast you come up with more creative, innovative solutions. Once you have that, you can see talk about these platforms if, and when, they are determined to be the right tools to be most effective in reaching your audience.

Oh, there are more dirty words like Friendfeed and Delicious, even more general terms like blog and wiki, but removing those seven from your planning vocabulary will help you reach a new strategic mindset and come up with better solutions for your clients.

What are your seven dirty words? Let me know how this works for you!

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Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, marketing, Matt Dickman, social media, strategy, trends, Twitter, YouTube, seven dirty words

Financial Times Confirms Apple Tablet for September | Gadget Lab | Wired.com [del.icio.us]

2009-07-28T11:30:44-07:00

Interesting. Competes with iPod and Kindle.

Maximizing ROI: content as commerce

2009-07-14T14:12:43-04:00

In my career working in the digital marketing space, I have worked on hundreds of projects for clients in practically any industry you can think of. In that time, I have had the pleasure of working on a number of e-commerce sites that provided me a fantastic perspective on designing with conversion in mind.

One of my key takeaways in doing business online is that no matter how you execute (basic website, social media engagement, search engine marketing, etc.) and no matter what industry you are in, you MUST treat your content as commerce.

I cannot tell you how many meetings I had been in where people say, "We are not an e-commerce site, how can we measure ROI?". That's a bad point of view to have and this post will hopefully work to change your mind.

So, what do I mean by content as commerce? There are a couple of steps in this process. First, you have to do the little things right from the start. Usability is, as in e-commerce, a key to making sure that users can find what they are looking for quickly.

Second, map out your site and weight content that is a priority, then compare it to your actual traffic. See a difference? Here is a good model that I have used before to help with this mapping. This is from a guest post that I did for Drew McLellan back in 2007.

	Draw a map of your current site. You can use Visio, Word, pen and paper or anything else you have at your disposal. Just treat each page/object/action as a block and show them in their hierarchy.
	Now, create a copy of the map and color code each page so that is aligns with your business goals. For this example we'll say red is a top tier page that generates revenue, orange is a second tier support page, yellow is a third tier information page and blue is non-essential.
	Now, create a copy of the color-coded map and roughly scale each section as it relates to your page view metrics so that pages with more views are larger and less views are smaller. Try to keep them in proportion. This is where people go on your site compared with your business goals. In our example, we need to create tactics that shift more views to the red blocks and less to the blue. (Note: you could also scale based on time spent on each page or other key metric)

Third, we need to assign values to content in order to get some more concrete numbers. For example, you could assign a value of $5/5 points when a consumer downloads a PDF or $25 when they sign up for your email newsletter or $30 when they become a fan on Facebook. The more you roll these numbers up across all of the channels you participate in the better. This is obviously behind the scenes, so you can try it in your own time.

Action Name	Value	#	Total
Download White Paper	$15.00	750	$11,250.00
Became a Fan on Facebook	$25.00	2,500	$62,500.00

How do you get those numbers? You can obviously make them up, but this has more impact when the numbers are real and when they have executive buy-in. Another way is to use some old school comparisons like impressions or cost-per-acquisition. Ideally you can get to a place where you start to see the metrics take shape and the more that shape is printed in dollars, the more successful you will be. (You wouldn't spend time and money promoting something useless would you?)

Keys to succeeding with content-driven sites:

Create a clear interface for your users
Rank content in the order it is valuable to the business, weigh that with the value to the consumer (these should ideally be aligned)
Visualize your traffic to see where it is going and shift it to the content you value
Adapt over time. You can A/B test content, tease it with advertising or promote it in email to see what works. This makes the rest of your marketing better as well.
Assign values for specific actions and track it over time.

What are your thoughts? What would you add to this list?

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Technorati Tags: marketing, measurement, strategy, trends, Usability

Twitter Outsources Ad Model Development [del.icio.us]

2009-07-13T09:23:48-07:00

Trendrr [del.icio.us]

2009-06-29T06:04:14-07:00

Rebuilding corporate reputations - The McKinsey Quarterly [del.icio.us]

2009-06-19T09:55:59-07:00

newsmap [del.icio.us]

2009-06-17T09:50:09-07:00

Text to newsstand

2009-06-10T21:46:58-04:00

I was flipping through the Economist the other day (because it exhausts me to try to actually read the whole thing) while I was on the plane and came across this insert in the magazine. I found it quite interesting and wanted to get your take.

The point of the service is to send a text message to receive alerts when the print publication is hitting newsstands. It's an interesting idea in the promotion of print with digital platforms. Obviously the content strategy is to release at the stands first and then online to keep print subs up.

What do you think of this? Would you sign up? Would you want this service for other printed materials? There are a number of magazines that I read but don't subscribe to for which this is an interesting idea.

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Technorati Tags: advertising, marketing, Matt Dickman, mobile, SMS, Techno//Marketer, technology, trends

How Apple's New iPhone Changes Mobile Marketing - Advertising Age [del.icio.us]

2009-06-09T08:57:47-07:00

Twitter launches verification service to protect celebrities [del.icio.us]

2009-06-08T08:20:05-07:00

monitter : real time, live twitter monitor [del.icio.us]

2009-06-02T11:33:28-07:00

Search for Twitter within a certain distance of a location.

YouTube - BooneOakley.com - Home Page [del.icio.us]

2009-06-01T15:51:47-07:00

Agency using YouTube's interactivity to create their website in video.

Google Wave Preview [del.icio.us]

2009-06-01T15:32:34-07:00

One hour, 20 minutes of video introducing Google Wave.

iPhone nabs 59% of smartphone 'net traffic, 43% of mobile web traffic [del.icio.us]

2009-06-01T14:30:40-07:00

Launched: Papa John's Road Trip augmented reality

2009-06-01T13:25:05-04:00

Launched is a series that highlights practitioners who are using social media in consumer and B2B campaigns. The goal is to cut out the theory and rhetoric and focus on real world examples of social media in action.

This example is for a Papa John's campaign created by Fleishman-Hillard (my employer) and includes physical events, social media hooks and includes a cool augmented reality example. The campaign is in support of Papa John's 25th anniversary and ties into the Road Trip program. This post looks at the augmented reality application and tie to the broader campaign.

Here is a quick video overview of the technology:

[Feed readers please click through to the post to see the video.]

Marketing takeaways:

Good use of technology to tie physical customer interactions back to virtual elements and then through to transaction
Measurement through unique coupon codes in the augmented reality environment

If you have a suggestion for a future episode of Launched, drop me an email.

For my complete library of my videos for marketers, click here.

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Technorati Tags: FleishmanHillard, PapaJohns, marketing, Matt Dickman, Techno//Marketer, technology, trends, video, virtual worlds, web2.0, Augmented Reality