The Social Concept

C2C? What Social Software Solution Extole Is Doing Right

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:11:34 -0800

I’ve been briefed by about 80 social software companies in the last 5 years, so it’s rare that I come across a vendor and say, “Wow, this is a new category.”

I first ran into Extole CRO Greg Brown at InfusionCon in Phoenix, earlier this year. The whole customer-to-customer (C2C) category had been on my radar for some time, but I always saw software companies taking a generalist approach to the category, and trying to lump C2C solutions in with their bigger suites (i.e. Buddy Media, CrowdFactory).

This isn’t a dig on those two companies, simply a different choice of approach – the classic point-solution vs. suite-solution software conundrum.

First, let’s define what “C2C” looks like, because any new social media acronym can be really confusing. This screenshot from Skymall, one of Extole’s customers, sums it up. Essentially, if you refer a friend to Skymall, you get $10, and they get $10. Sure, this is not a “new” formula – the idea of referral marketing goes back at least two generations.

But, C2C referral marketing has always been a really annoying, friction-filled transaction. Imagine trying to refer someone to your Toyota dealer in 1992. You would have had to call them, they would have had to walk into the car dealership and give your name… just thinking about it gives me a headache.

Extole’s software has removed the friction from this process for a cool and diverse set of customers. There’s one thing that I’m seeing in common from a lot of their case study customers – many of them are doing something new and cool, too. For example, Redbox changed the in-person video-rental industry and SolarCity changed the consumer-utility market. Sure, Extole has some more “mainstream” customers, but I dig their tendency to work with companies that are trying to change the rules.

Their product has three other legs: social promotion, social expression and social analytics. Now, it may not be a suite solution, like the Marketo/CrowdFactory suite, but if I were an $1B+ customer-facing brand, I would want to be using a point (best-of-breed) solution like Extole’s.

They’re seriously the first vendor I’ve seen that really takes a “fully integrated approach” (their phrase, not mine) to C2C social marketing. This video really nails it, around the 2-min mark.

Here’s a few of the things that I think they’re really doing right, from a customer acquisition perspective:

1. Across-the-board usage of all key social platforms (including Pinterest) – very few software companies with under 100 employees master this kind of blocking and tackling really well.

2. They have nearly by name brands that focus on real-world business objectives (sales, etc.) rather than silly social media vanity metrics.

3. Their library of whitepapers is cleanly set up, and materials focus on timely topics aimed at mid-level customer-facing decision-makers (Facebook Open Graph, Basics of Social Referral Programs)

4. Clean and easy forms: So few social media software companies understand the importance of using form-fills of less than 10 fields, to make for quick and consistent lead-gen.

5. Drinking Their Own Champagne: Extole uses referral marketing themselves, and offers $1k for customer referrals. It’s a small touch, but meaningful.

Here’s what I’d perhaps change, if I were them, and I wanted to add on a few more marquee customers.

1. The Inverse Bell Curve: Extole gates all (top-of-funnel) TOFU and end-of-funnel content in their content library. Statistically, this actually hurts lead quantity for MQLs (market-qualified leads). The place to “tighten up” is the middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU), where prospective customer pain is greatest. Hat tip to Jon Miller for this concept.

2. Auto-form-fills: When you’ve got super-cool technology, you want leads to be able to get their hands on it as quickly as possible. Using something like Reachforce’s Smartforms makes it easier for busy enterprise marketers to get their hands on your goodies.

3. CTA-driven blog posts: This is a mere tactical fix, but Extole’s blog posts don’t run full-text in RSS, and they don’t bear calls-to-action. Fixing this would better allow them to share their best practices, and develop leads. I agree with Techdirt’s article on this one. Even if you’re not a publisher, running a truncated blog feed is not usually good for creating new customers.

4. Quantification Around C2C Org Maturity: This is my big one. The one thing that I think Extole’s customers are going to look to them for, in the TOFU and MOFU buy cycle stages, is some kind of benchmark for where their organization is, around C2C, and what it’s costing them to not be further along in maturity. Some type of calculator or organizational “C2C revenue score” that quantifies this type of maturity would be really helpful in helping mid-level marketing decision-makers define and quantify their need.

5. Weekly Webinars: Since the C2C Referral Category is not nearly as well known to enterprise brands as the other 5 social marketing use cases, they could gain a lot more brand awareness by simply evangelizing not only their software’s use case, but all of the actionable metrics from it. This is something that marketing automation brands like Marketo and Hubspot did very well, in their early days. To beef up attendance, they can partner with big data vendors who hunger to be seen with cool social firms, or with analyst/consultant types with email invite lists of 10k-100k each.

Privacy Policy

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 01:11:19 -0800

Since we’re now sometimes giving away webinars, presentations and audio files on Facebook and LinkedIn, we wanted to give you a quick and simple privacy policy.

1. We do not sell or share your data with any third party.
2. We purge bad email addresses from our marketing database on a monthly basis.
3. We keep all credit cards in a PCI-compliant system (PCI DSS), and you can read the specs on it here.
4. We only track website visitors for 30 days, and then we delete the cookies on our end. Of course, you can delete them on your end at any time.
5. When we do a joint event with another company, we always give any newly acquired “leads” or, as we prefer to call them, invitees, the option to opt-out immediately. Even if we’ve legally acquired opt-in, we prefer to have real, knowing consent.

If you have any questions about our privacy policy, please leave a comment below.

Metzbox Functionality

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:10:39 -0700

We’ve received a four emails lately regarding the MetzBox functionality of the website, and I wanted to explain why we’d yanked it, post-publication, from The Social Customer. It’s our intention to remove all references to it from the future editions of the book, so no readers will be confused.

In the world of publishing, publishers typically promise non-fiction authors certain amounts of marketing monies. When publishers do not come forward with promised monies, as they are non-binding promises, authors must dig into their own pockets to cover marketing and advertising expenses, at times.

This can put authors in a difficult financial position of having to decided between delivering upon promised “extras” or simply making their book available to a wider audience, by pouring previously earmarked development monies into marketing and advertising.

This allocation of funds does not improve the author’s financial state, as all the author is trying to do in allocating said monies is to recoup their initial publishing advance.

The choice we made was a difficult choice, but it’s one that we think any non-fiction author would have made, had they been in our shoes.

In addition 90% of the promised content is still available for free in our DOWNLOADS section.

Automating Your Webinar Sign-Up & How To Get People To SKIP Your Webinars And Still Love You

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 12:09:43 -0700

I had a great support call yesterday with Maurice Colon on Infusionsoft’s support team. We’d been trying to set up a way to make a campaign for not only our series of upcoming webinars, but for cloning, so that when we had a webinar in the future, we could clone the whole darn campaign. That saves us about 4-5 hours of work. It also allows us to give a copy of the campaign to our webinar partners, who usually use software like Infusionsoft, Hubspot or Marketo, so they can copy what we do.

We’ve been using Oakland-based Maestroconference for about a year-and-a-half now, and although we only initially began using them for tele-conferences, Starting in a few weeks, we’re dumping Webex and GoToWebinar and beginning to use their ScreenShare product. Yes, we know it’s only in beta, but Maestro’s Customer Service has been absolutely top-notch, and when we have a vendor that good, we want to help them “break in” their new offerings. The $97 version of their screenshare product is extremely competitive with Webex and GoToWebinar, and if you’re an Infusionsoft customer, it’s the best deal. Here’s why.

If you’re an Infusionsoft customer, with only two clicks, you can get Infusionsoft to automatically sign up a customer (or lead) for one of your webinars. You don’t need any apps, or any funky integrations. It’s really easy. (Hubspot actually got rid of their webinar product recently, for the right reasons – it was simply too complex. I’m thinking they’re working on something new right now. In the meantime, I’d encourage Hubspot customers to take Maestro for a spin.)

So, Marketo published a great 16-page eBook on webinars about a year ago. And, if you turn to the third page, you’ll see a freaking brilliant webinar tip. I don’t know who came up with this, but I’m guessing it was someone on Maria Pergolino’s team (one of the best marketers I know). Here’s what they recommend. Read this really slow so it completely sinks in.

OFFER PEOPLE the option of NOT coming to your webinar and having you mail them the slides. It turns out that 20-30% of the people who were given this choice actually said YES! Seriously, how long does it take to grab your slides after a webinar, and either email a powerpoint, or set them up in Brainshark. The leads and customers will love you, and you might get people to attend the real webinar next time.

If anyone feels like trying out Maestro, the link above is good for a 30-day trial, so go ahead and do 4 weekly webinars on the house.

If You’re Not Queueing, Then What The Heck Are You Doing?

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:09:34 -0700

I work with small business execs for the most part, and I have since 2008. One thing that most of them have in common is that they’re smart and interesting people, and they typically share cool content, when they choose to use social media.

Way back in 2007, when small business execs began using social, they just manually shared stuff. They posted cool items to their Facebook or Twitter feeds manually. That was good enough, at the time. Then, around 2010, social media software got pretty affordable. For $30 a month, execs were able to buy software that would allow them to pre-schedule posts. You could sit down once a week for 45 minutes and set up the bulk of your social media content for the next week. Throw in a few spontaneous posts over the course of the week, and you’re good to go, right?

So, I’ve been a Sprout Social customer since about a year ago, and when they came out with their Queue offering, I was kind of blown away. The whole notion of having a “smart queue” for posting social media content is a tremendous boon to small business execs. Let’s face it, when you’re posting social media content, it falls into one of two categories:

1. Super-important stuff that my followers need to know about now (FIRST)
2. Not-so-important stuff that people can find out about later (LAST)

And the queue is set up just for that. They even have a function that figures out the optimal time to post stuff. I’ve begun using that function in the last week.

Ever since I started using the queue, my numbers have done just great. Our Facebook fans are up 2500%, and Twitter followers are up 24%. There was a minimal Facebook ad investment as well (about $4/day), but that was the only thing we did differently in that time period.

If you want to try it out queueing, here’s a 30-day free pass. Their support is absolutely amazing, so if you get stuck on anything just call them at their office in Chicago, and they’ll hook you up.

See if it has a big impact on your company’s numbers, and then make your decisions from there.

Using A Samsung Phone With A Mac

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:09:48 -0700

So, after 2 iPhone disappearances – the first time, it was lifted from my bag at an Oakland, California restaurant, and the second time it somehow fell from my pocket in the lobby of our condo – I’ve moved to the Samsung GT-I9070.

This phone came out about 6 months ago, and on the Apple scale, I’d compare it to an iPhone 4. It’s got a 5MP camera, and it seems to be a bit faster than the Nexus S.

But I realized there’s pretty few resources on using an Android Samsung phone with a Mac. So here goes.

1. Easy Phone Sync – Samsung launched this service about 90 days ago, to help get Apple customers off of IOS. You download it from the Android App Store. Do this first. This will also sync your iTunes content. You can guess that Apple is not happy about this.

2 FoneSync For Macs – If you still need it, this app syncs your calendar and contacts. They let you try the demo before you buy it, just to check that it works with your phone. This app alone will save you about 8 hours of busywork, if you have a couple hundred contacts in your phone. It’s made by a couple of German guys, and they actually post their phone number on the website.

2. Samsung Galaxy Music Hub – Well, Samsung isn’t waiting for anyone to go and buy their tunes on iTunes; they’ve launched their own store, and it even competes with Spotify and the iTunes Match offering, which lets you put your music in the cloud. They’ve actually given away the movie , for free, on 9/25, to Galaxy S3 customers.

Start with these three, and if you see any more good ones, let me know in the comments.

Simplfying Your Small Business With "The Pocket Guide"

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 08:08:37 -0700

I get a lot of eBooks floating across my desk – seriously 2 or 3 per day. When Tyler Garns, the guy who used to run marketing at Infusionsoft, let me know that he wrote a 45-page eBook called “The Unofficial Administrator’s Pocket Guide To Infusionsoft,” I knew it had to be good.

But before sharing anything like this with my readers, who are nearly all C-level execs in companies with less than 300 employees, I needed to vet this bad boy, and make sure it was up to snuff. Simply put, this is one of the most useful things I’ve read about the InfusionSoft platform, and even if you’re NOT an Infusionsoft customer – let’s say you’re using Salesforce, SugarCRM, or some other platform to run your small business – this is simply one of the best customer relationship management and workflow documents I’ve read in years.

In addition to being a critical, marketing-speak free evaluation of the Infusionsoft platform (from the guy who ran Infusionsoft’s Infusionsoft, if you can get any more “meta” than that), it’s an absolutely great primer on running your business, from a customer-data perspective, and will save you hours and hours of time. I think Tyler’s selling it for under $20, so, by all means, if you have a CRM, and especially if you use Infusionsoft, grab a copy of it.

By the way, there’s no disclaimer here, we’re not financially linked to Tyler’s firm, and we’d always post a disclaimer if we were to receive affiliate monies from any software or product.

Why Marketo Bought CrowdFactory: Explaining The Acquisition

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 08:07:51 -0700

It’s funny – there have been a number of big social media and marketing automation partnerships in 2012, but no one from any of the key vendors involved (Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot) have really issued a statement as to why the gigantic moves into the social media lead generation space were made.

I got the chance to do a few emails last week with Marketo founder Jon Miller, while doing research for an upcoming book, and he gave me some real insight. You need to read between the lines a bit when you read the first two sentences of the quote below, because it calls to attention something that few marketing automation vendors have picked up on: it’s not 2007 anymore.

“Social Media is evolving. What began as listening (italics mine) quickly evolved into having a presence and publishing content. While this foundation is still vital for social marketing, the next phase is word of mouth,” said Marketo founder Jon Miller.

This means that if you ain’t proactive, you ain’t managing your revenue performance, period.

“Customers and prospects are relying more heavily on recommendations from peers within their networks and businesses need new tools to be part of these conversations,” Miller said.

This means that without social, you’re missing a huge piece of your top-of-funnel.

“With the acquisition of Crowd Factory by Marketo, businesses can now leverage a suite of applications to give a social boost to their marketing campaigns, and amplify each digital interaction,” Miller said.

Does that make it a little clearer? Without social at the top of the funnel, all day, every day, you’re losing money.

Mexico, Chapter Three: Stuff You Will Absolutely Need (Not Including Clothes)

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 09:07:51 -0700

If you’re planning on spending a year or more in a foreign country, the clothing thing is pretty clear – you’re going to need a week or two’s worth, depending on how much “specialty” clothing you like to carry around (overcoats, hoodies, hats, etc.). We’ll deal with the clothing part in tomorrow’s post. Today, let’s talk accessories – we’re going over everything that you’d want to bring with you except your clothing.

1. Electronics – For this one, you’ll simply need the big three – phone, tablet (if you’ve got one), and laptop. Yes, I have a big desktop, but I’m not bringing it. I moved all of my documents into iCloud and Google Drive. For folks who absolutely “gotta have it,” throw in the Kindle, and perhaps an extra small hard drive if your music collection is huge. Between the two of them, you’ll get 10GB for free.

1a. Electronics Adapters: As far as 120V adapters go, you can buy those in Mexico. Not as big of a deal as one would think. That said, bring 2 iPhone or phone chargers if you have them, as well as an extra laptop charger if you have it. Apple Stores and eBay mail delivery are not nearly as solid in foreign countries.

1b. Digital Subscriptions: Keep in mind, there’s nothing wrong with taking your Netflix, Spotify or Rosetta Stone with you to Mexico. (I pay $29, combined, per month for those three), but the selection may be a little different. Perhaps give it a shot for the first month, and then turn it off, if you don’t like what you see.

2. Toiletries: As you may have guessed, Amazon’s delivery terms to Mexico and Central America seem a little tough to understand – that’s why Costco and Walmart are such a big deal down there. (In reality, though, it’s actually pretty simple – Amazon has a duty-free global site. Their Amazon Global shipping typically takes 10-12 days. It’s really not that bad, and you can get all personal care and regular Amazon items (books, DVDs, etc.)

You may want to make one big Amazon order before you go if you’re into high-end toiletries like pricey moisturizer, fancy deodorant, and things like that. If you’re trying to avoid having to check luggage, keep the final order to multiples of the travel sizes, which are often cheaper than the big sizes (at least for men’s brands like Anthony or Kiehls), surprisingly enough.

2a. Prescriptions (or not): Depending on what kind of duration your trip is, the prescription thing may not be a big deal. For any drugs that you may be taking regularly, the easiest thing to do is to get them shipped from your mega-pharmacy (Walgreens/CVS/whatever) to a Mailboxes Etc. type place wherever you are in Mexico. One thing to remember: if your prescription is not for a controlled substance (i.e. Valium, etc.), you may be able to simply buy it over the counter in Mexico. Drugs that would fall into that category include Viagra, anti-depressants, and even cosmetic drugs like the eyelash-lengthening Latisse.

3. Books: This is a tough one, especially for people who don’t love electronic books. If you’re really attached to your hand-written journal, by all means, bring it with you. Other than that, “hard” (i.e. printed) books are going to be a pain to travel with in Mexico. This is where the 5.98 oz. Kindle really comes in handy.

One other note; this may seem a bit anachronistic, but it’s time to renew your library card, and perhaps to even get a SECOND library card, in the city where your parents live. Here’s why: you can usually get a nice, large library of digital books and audio books at no charge, as most libraries in the USA (and some in Canada) work with the OverDrive apps, which you download on almost any phone or tablet. (Yes, you can convert the Overdrive eBooks to Kindle format, but it takes 30 seconds to do it).

4. Other Work/Office Materials: Generally speaking, any Mexican rental office will have all of the typical office supplies that you’d find in the USA or Canada, so there’s no need to pack staplers or sticky notes. If you’re wondering how far Office Depot has gotten into Mexico, let’s put it this way. The Cabo San Jose Office Depot has a Facebook page.

In the next few days, we’ll look at the ideal suitcase of clothing – or, how to do Mexico, or pretty much any country, indefinitely, on 7-14 days worth of clothes.

How To Move To Mexico (As A U.S.A. Person), Chapter 2: Meditation

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 07:07:59 -0700

Part of the whole traveling experience is learning to feel (and to stay feeling) at home, anywhere in the world. It makes travel a whole lot less solitary, and a helluva lot more grounding, and more relaxing. Today, let’s look at one of the best ways to make that happen: meditation.

I’m writing this at a San Francisco Starbucks, actually, and I just meditated a few minutes ago. I just meditated in a little garden across the street from this Starbucks, having been thrown out of the lobby of a corporation where I arrived unceremoniously (60 minutes) early for a book signing.

Meditation is something that I never really believed that I could do until about 2 years ago, when I was 32. I was reading about meditation somewhere, and I finally went on my Kindle and downloaded Victor Davich’s great book, 8-Minute Meditation. That book made me realize that not necessarily everyone who writes or talks about meditation is completely full of shit, or a total hippie. (Until then, I thought meditation was the domain of mountaintop gurus, hippie burn-outs, and, well, people with way more patience than me).

Accompanied by the help of a bunch of candles, my iPhone timer, some incense, and occasionally, a copy of my favorite album, The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds.,” I was able to begin an 8-minute daily meditation practice. I know, that doesn’t really sound like that much. But, if you do the math, I meditated about 48 hours that year. That’s practically a week. It made me more thoughtful, a little kinder, and in general, I think, a better person.

Then, the book encouraged me to kick my daily practice up to 10 minutes, then 12 minutes, then 14 minutes. About a year later, I had basically thrown in the towel. My friend Rachel told me that her husband meditated something like 30 minutes every morning. I thought, “Shit, I’m not doing any of this right compared to him – what’s the point.” I know – what a dumb thought, huh? I don’t know why I let that let me quit meditating for about six months.

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten way back into it – and enthusiastically so – with the help of a colorful Brit, a guy by the name of Andy Puddicombe. He developed a pretty amazing app for the iPhone, iPad or, really, for any computer. It’s called Headspace, and it teaches you to meditate. No gurus, no religious stuff, just basic 10-minute meditations. He even gives you 10 days worth of 10-minute meditations to get you started. (They charge a few bucks if you’d like to download his other 355 meditation classes, but, heck, it’s cool that they’ve got a week and half’s worth of free stuff.)

Through using Headspace, I’ve really honed my meditation practice, and I’ve really renewed my passion for it. Some days I do two 10-minute meditations, and I think it’s really helped me. It’s helped my sleep, my concentration at work, my sex life, and more than anything, my ability to care and be present for other people.

Part of the reason that people travel is to get in touch with a reality that’s different from their own. The way that you get in touch with that reality, is by being able to truly care about other people. And to do that, you’ve gotta be 100% present for them. So, it’s fair to say that one of the easiest ways to do that is by taking a bare minimum of 10 minutes every day to take care of yourself, and meditate. It doesn’t cost a damn thing, and I promise it will make you feel great.

I know, you’re thinking, “Well, what if I start thinking, and then I fuck it up, and I don’t meditate right.”

My advice: stop being so hard on yourself. Just try it out for 10 minutes using Headspace, or grab a copy of the Victor Davich book and set your timer. If you don’t like it, try it one more time a week later. I think you’ll be hooked, much like I was. And that will make you a much better traveler. As someone who’s been on the road for about 25% of the time in the last 4 years, I think that’s something worth achieving.