Here’s a short article on a very successful pordcast initiative that I sent MarketingSherpa and they published it in their annual Marketing Wisdom report for 2010. This year’s report features 70 real-life stories and lessons from marketers who weathered last year’s brutal economy. You may download the full Marketing Wisdom 2010 report here.

Last year, Covisio ran an extremely successful podcasting program for one of our clients. Our main goal was to generate podcasting content that was valuable to our client’s target audience. If we were successful with that, we knew we would get better brand awareness, increase online reputation, demonstrate thought leadership, boost web traffic, and, ultimately, facilitate the sales process. So here’s a few things we did differently:

1. All podcast participants were industry experts (non-affiliated with our client) that shared their insights on key industry topics.

2. No promotional pitches for our client were allowed in the podcasts; rather the focus was on hot-button industry topics.

3. Each podcast was structured in a way that could provide the most value to the audience (in terms of topic, insights, length, etc.)

4. The podcasts were hosted in an open WordPress/Podpress platform allowing for social sharing, bookmarking, tagging, rating, etc. No registration forms were required to access the podcasts.

5. The podcasting program was tightly integrated into our clients marketing mix and featured on their web site, their e-newsletter, their blog, their social network presences, and so on.

6. Production costs were kept low primarily because the content itself ended up being extremely valuable.

In social media marketing, if you provide value to your community, you will get value back!

If you would like to visit the site of the award-winning podcasting program (that’s still being very very successful), it’s Xyleme Voices.

MarketingProfs B2B Forum just finished up.  Very well organized event, great network of colleagues as always, excellent keynotes, some good insights overall, but, honestly, I feel I only got some tangible value out of maybe half the presentations I attended (so, clearly, I did not choose wisely what sessions to go to).  My feedback for that: would it be possible for MarketingProfs to tag sessions with a bit more info so as to help people like me on what to attend (an example would be to call out the level of the sessions so as to be able to better know what to expect)?

Cinco de Mayo Fiesta.

In any case, it was time well spent in Boston and here are my key takeaways from the event!

Tue, May 4^th

Advanced Landing Pages that Improve Campaign ROI
Anna Telerico, ion interactive | Scott Brandt, SurePayroll | Michael Burgess, Moog

Advanced landing pages = part of plan, with specific goals & objectives, methodical (what/why), tested & optimized, managed

Results: 2-10x conversion rate increase, cost-per-acquisition decrease

Best practices:

• Segment landing pages to drive visitors (maybe different clicks or different tabs for visitors to self-segment)
• Consider asking specific questions (yes/no) before the lead capture form to engage visitors
• Consider 2-step landing page
• Provide assuring customer quote to establish trust
• Make sure you clearly direct visitors, don’t leave them with too many options to choose

Empirical data:

• Extra field in form asking visitors if they would like to subscribe to receive communications from vendor made no statistical difference in open rates or CTRs
• Test of two campaigns driving visitors to a landing page:
  - Roadblock ad: higher click-throughs to landing page, lower conversions
  - Text ad in newsletter: lower click-throughs to landing page, much higher conversions

Key points:

• Measure sales not just leads
• Innovate vs. iterate for landing page development
• Leverage existing content assets
• Remember: one size does not fit all
• Test, test, test
• Measure, measure, measure
• Be consistent: keep promises, don’t break them

Insights into 2010 B2B Marketing Budgets and Tactics Mix
Peter Burris, Forrester Research | Roy Young, MarketingProfs

#1 challenge in B2B marketing is still demand generation (top 3 challenges: generate more leads, reach decision makers, improve lead quality)

88% of business technology professionals are using social media to make decisions; 12% are not

Old marketing engagements:

 
New marketing engagements:

Advice:

• Shift demand from outbound campaigns to inbound dialogue creation
• Develop, not just generate demand
• Integrate physical and digital marketing
• Think POST = People => Objectives => Strategy => Tactics

Filing the Pipeline: Finding the Leads that Sales Needs
M.H. McIntosh, Mac McIntosh Inc. | Anne Marie Corbett, Globoforce

Use low-cost marketing activities at front of pipeline: acquire, nurture, qualify

Use high cost marketing activities at back of pipeline: demo, propose, close

The four “rights”:

1. Target the right prospects
2. Make the right offers
3. Use the right media
4. At the right timing

Marketing Challenge! Lead Management Automation Systems
Laura Ramos from Xerox (ex-Forrester) with Marketo, Eloqua, Genius.com, Neolane

Absolutely great session, but I did not keep notes

Wed, May 5^th

Why Email, CRM and Social Media have become the Tools of Modern B2B Marketing
Joel Book, ExactTarget | Sallie Anthony, Genworth Financial

Don’t think of email alone, think of email + CRM and of email + social media

66% of Fortune 100 companies use Twitter to engage their audience

Case study:

• Break email foundation, integrate with CRM, integrate with social media

Best practices:

• Send email from sales person’s address and include their photo to make more personable
• Create customized emails using dynamic content based on recipient profile (via email automation system and Salesforce.com) so as to consolidate different content offers into a single email

Results:

• 12% in sales with $420 investment
• Go from 4 to 2 marketers
• Enable advanced reporting within Salesforce.com

Lead Planning & Nurturing that Converts More Customers
Carlos Hidalgo, The Annuitas Group

Leads that are nurtured record 47% higher order value over those leads that were not nurtured (Aberdeen)

New leads: 15% are ready to buy, 15% have to be discarded, 70% need to nurture

Open rates for nurture email campaigns are twice that of one-off emails

Click rates for nurture email campaigns are three times that of one-off emails

We can have marketing nurture campaigns (for marketing qualified leads) and sales acceleration nurture campaigns (for sales qualified leads)

Key: involve sales in the process!

Also, check all the great tweets from the event, there are a lot of great lines there. Until next time, … A bientot!

A few months ago I read a nice post by Adam Cohen on when social media is right for your business and when not; it was entertaining and conversational as well as quite truthful. So, based on my own experiences in social media marketing, I wanted to post a few notions that I think are still largely misrepresented in a number of organizations.

Any other ideas?

With the amount of hype and plethora of information on social media monitoring, the selection of a social media monitoring tool can seem like a daunting task. It doesn’t have to be, as long as it’s understood that there is absolutely no silver bullet here and the tool is only a part of your social media strategy.

Having been through this selection process in a number of client projects, here are few steps to (hopefully) make it a bit easier to follow:

1. Research. Arguably, each tool tends to focus on different ends of the market (e.g. small to medium ventures vs. large enterprises vs. agencies monitoring multiple brands) and may follow different approaches (e.g. monitor everything social media vs. focus on specific groups of influencers), therefore it’d be good to do some upfront research (that includes price points as well because there is variance there too). Don’t be afraid to talk to vendors about what you are trying to do; they are usually very helpful, but remember it’s a new paradigm, so no one can have all the answers on a plate.

2. Plan. Before trying the tools, set a clear plan on what you want to achieve. Define this plan around a real-world situation for your organization, not around some hypothetical case (actually most vendors’ case studies are based on very high profile searches that generate tons of social media activity, this might not be realistic for your organization’s scope). It’s easy to get lost in the vast amount of social media data that’s out there, so having a well-defined goal with measurable objectives and pragmatic tactics to achieve them is what you should always start out with.

3. Evaluate. Although not much comparative information is available to size up one tool next to another, almost all vendors offer some type of free sandbox account or trial version or live product demo, so this is something to definitely benefit from before making a decision on what tool to pick. Set up multiple trials in parallel for the same plan to be able to evaluate the capabilities of each tool side by side but always keeping your plan and goal from #2 in mind.

4. Adapt. When evaluating the tools, spend some time initially and keep revising regularly to fine tune the configuration of your search profiles (in terms of keywords to include/exclude as well as sources to filter in/out). It is clear that these tools require some adapting to effectively monitor a specific industry by making sure they get to know the most influential social media outlets. This makes a great difference in the amount and relevancy of the results you will be getting back from the tools (and from any search tool for that matter).

5. Oversee. Don’t forget that the data and reports coming out of the tools do require human processing and oversight to become truly useful and actionable when trying to meet real business needs (in this case, your plan and goal from #2). Actually, there is a great post by Matt Dickman on how to execute a listening plan that builds this point to full extend. This is becoming a more and more important factor in the sense that now that you start having social media monitoring data, what do you do with it? Depending on your objectives, the types of engagement will differ, but ultimately, certain processes are common for whatever you are trying achieve, for example you will always need to:

• Identify internal or external resources that can engage on social media.
• Set up a workflow to communicate opportunities and engage properly and timely.
• Plan and execute engagement actions and track follow-ups.
• Etc.

6. Measure & report. Regarding comparative monitoring performance among the tools, there may be certain case studies (see Ken Burbary’s post and an older post of mine), but there is no conclusive evidence that one tool does better than another for certain media types. In any case, you should track measurements and generate reports for each tool to be able to make your final decision. Your metrics should refer to your plan and goal from #2, but may extend to cover potentially new areas that you have uncovered while using the tools and can be valuable to your organization.

7. Diversify. Lastly, I would recommend using at least a couple of tools to make sure you get different angles in your monitoring efforts. Maybe a mix of paid and unpaid tools like, for example, Radian6 or SM2 coupled with Google Alerts, Social Mention, and/or Twitter Search.

Lastly, one final note: The social media monitoring space is already getting crowded with existing players and new entrants and more are coming, so it might seem overwhelming at first to try to try to pick a product or service to use – btw, you may get an almost full list of all the tools at Ken Burbary’s wiki. That won’t change any time soon. Expect new vendors to try to find their niche by specializing on certain types of uses and integrating with other analytics technologies for more sophisticated functionality. Also, expect more M&As and consolidations before few sizable players settle down (think Microsoft and Google among others). So, you may want to take that into account if you are getting ready to commit to a tool.

This year Covisio had the opportunity to run a number of social media listening campaigns for our clients worldwide (please note that our clients are primarily in the high technology sector). As we are rapidly approaching the end of the year, I wanted to share a few real-world cases that we came across and I think are quite useful to show what can happen (or not happen) in social media monitoring programs.

So here are our most telling stories:

Disgruntled user group on Facebook. One of our clients was operating under the not-so-uncommon assumption that: “Our firm is not yet doing anything on social media, so there shouldn’t be anything on us out there, right?” Unfortunately, wrong! For this particular client, there were a number of LinkedIn groups of current and ex- employees, a few product and promotional videos (that our client did not know they even existed) on YouTube, and at least two groups (with memberships at the thousands) dedicated to complaints about the client’s product on Facebook. A very basic listening campaign picked all that up and helped direct and prioritize our client’s social media efforts to remedy the developing bad reputation.

PR agency miss. One of our clients was very proud of one particular feature of their product that differentiated themselves from their competitors in the marketplace. A leading US newspaper published an article on the impact this particular feature had on the market and invited our client’s top competitor to comment on it (without even mentioning our client in the article). Our client’s PR agency completely missed this opportunity both before and after it was published. Now, the newspaper also published a post on their technology blog about their article, which our listening campaign picked up. Based on this information, our client had to revisit their relationship with their PR agency, but, more importantly, they were able to post a comment on the newspaper’s blog with their own view on the particular feature, which it turn generated some excellent traffic on their own blog where they discuss in detail their differentiating functionality.

New sales opportunity. Our listening campaign picked up a blog post of a CxO that was explaining in detail their immediate need for a specific product that one of our clients provides. The blog post included a thorough analysis of requirements and a good qualification of the opportunity in terms of influencers, competitors, and timeframes. Our client was able to jump in the opportunity and they are now in the final shortlist.

Sensitive material on YouTube. Actually, something that’s very common. Our listening campaign revealed a couple of product demo videos on YouTube with sensitive information about the technology of one of our clients. The videos were posted by an implementation consultant with the best of intentions, but our client was uncomfortable with the information disclosed, so the videos were quickly taken down in agreement with the consultant.

Competitive intelligence. A wealth of information here:

• Figuring out what blogs from our client’s competitors are working and what not. Examples: We came across a competitor blog with tremendous engagement level and we learned a lot from it. But we also came across a competitor blog that does not allow commenting (which, in general, is against what we consider best practices) and we learned a few things from it as well.
• Uncovering “black-hat” SEO techniques our client’s competitors were using by publishing duplicate content in multiple social media outlets just to build links to their site.
• Discovering aggressive and unsolicited tweets from our client’s competitors to infiltrate conversations on Twitter and blatantly promote their product.
• Identifying new competitors in our client’s field based on their activity on social media.

PR pickup on Twitter. How many followers did our client’s press release reach via tweets and re-tweets? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? A useful number we have been able to benchmark against on behalf of our clients.

SEO hints. One of our clients is providing a technology solution in an emerging market. Despite a well-coordinated SEO effort, our listening campaign found out that some of their keywords were not used in the context that was initially assumed, so they had to be reevaluated.

Positive mentions. This is an important one. Our listening campaign for a specific marketing program of one of our clients found out a number of ongoing positive mentions on blogs, Twitter accounts, forums, wikis, social networks. It made a huge difference for our client to be able to identify these mentions and thank people for their feedback.

Conversations spanning multiple media. A very influential blog post generated a tremendous amount of discussion in the form of comments, additional posts on other blogs, new topics in forums, and opinionated conversations on social networks. The ability to consolidate all this information and get a global understanding of the issue at hand and all the different stakeholders involved was very valuable for our client to decide on how and when to engage in the conversation.

Inside information on industry events. Before, during, and after major industry events there is a lot of activity on blogs, social networks, and Twitter. Although part of this activity is mainly for event attendees to connect to each other and socialize at the event, we have found some great insights about the topics covered in the event for one of our clients that was not able to attend.

These are actually true cases we came along throughout year and not theoretical scenarios. Feel free to share your own social media monitoring stories from 2009.

MarketingProfs Digital Mixer 2009 just wrapped up. Great event overall, some sessions more insightful than others, no vendor pitches in the presentations, lots of powerful taglines (see #mpdm on Twitter), very good insights. Here’s my set of bulleted notes (note: B2B focus).

Oktoberfest dinner reception.

Effective Lead Generation with Webinars
Todd Davison, Bulldog Solutions | Michael Hickey, Hoovers (Dun & Bradstreet) | Jen Moeller, Human

• Webinars are a powerful tool for both thought leadership marketing and lead generation: they are trackable, measurable, scalable, and actionable.
• Segment your audience based on buyer personas for more targeted and engaged webinar events.
• Plan webinars along your yearly marketing events and plan for other marketing activities to keep up the conversation in-between webinars.
• Provide calls to action for the different buying cycle stages: Research (calls to action to gain permission to attract prospects) -> Evaluate (calls to action to overcome objections with “learn more” type of materials) -> Decide (calls to action to support decisions with testimonials, success stories, etc.)
• Apply lead scores to your registered leads (based on roles/personas/activity etc.) before passing them to sales (including leads from webinars).
• Are webinars more effective for new lead generation or for retention?

Using Video to Effectively Increase Marketing ROI
Ron Ploof, New Media Coach/Consultant | Michael Maxin, Divi Tree Media

• Do your videos in FLV.
• Video streaming service is important for end user experience.
• Closed captioning is not just for the hearing impaired, it also makes videos searchable.
• Educational videos can enable a company to reach more audiences than just the intended target one.
• Don’t make one-off videos, better make a series of videos in a dedicated video library.
• Video topic development? Email your sales rep for suggestions!
• Integrate videos to all marketing activities (online & offline, e.g. DVDs).
• Syndicate a few videos, but maintain links back to your video library.
• Make the videos easy to share, rate, forward (viral).
• How important is video quality for sharability?
• Social media is fully measurable, but are you willing to put in the effort to do it?
• “United breaks guitar” video: 5.7mn views and 22.6K comments in 4 months.
  Bob Taylor response video: 191K views and 311 comments in 3 months.
• How do people find your videos? Include text (search engines love text), use description fields, tag well & tag often, put a URL in a frame somewhere.

Social Media & Blogging: What’s Next?
Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything | Peter Shankman, HARO | Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing

• The two biggest mistakes companies make with social media: i) they broadcast, they don’t listen, and ii) they assign social media communications to their most junior employees.
• Our job is to create such great products and provide such great service that our customers do our PR for us.
• New media almost never kills old media; new media redefines old media.
• We are responsible for our own level of Twitter/blog mediocrity. The art of Twitter lies in the retweets, that is provide information that is worth forwarding.
• Determine what to tweet by asking yourself “Is this valuable to someone other than me?”
• If you are a better writer in social media than your competitor, you will win.

Social Media Measurement
Amber Naslund, Radian6

• It doesn’t matter what tool you use; there is no silver bullet in social media measurement. It needs hard work.
• Measurement is like laundry; it piles up the longer you wait to do it.
• Match your social media community to your salesforce database and see what the differences are. People in social media community but not in salesforce database = new opportunities to sell. People in salesforce database but not in social media community = new opportunities to engage.
• Social media provide great context to engage, so listen at the point of need to be relevant and useful!

Using Facebook to Increase Brand Recognition
Mari Smith, Relationship Marketing Specialist | Amy Porterfield, Social Media Strategy Consultant

• Set up vanity URLs.
• Successful Social Media Relationships = Quality Network + Quality Content + Consistency + Genuine, Authentic, Passionate Caring.
• Check out http://www.engagementdb.com that measures social media engagement by the Altimeter team.
• The POST method: What PEOPLE to target -> What is the primary OBJECTIVE -> What STRATEGIES to implement -> What TECHNOLOGIES to use (in that order).
• Use FBML to customize Facebook page look & feel and develop new apps/widgets.
• The Vin Diesel page on Facebook has more than 6.5mn fans! Interesting case story.

Integrating Social Media into your Marketing Strategy
Debra Ellis, Wilson & Ellis Consulting | Pam O’Neal, BreakingPoint Systems | Glenda Ervin, Lehman’s

• Market Intelligence -> Thought Leadership -> Demand Generation -> Sales Enablement.
• Listen first, then get noticed, then build relationships (transparency, quid pro quo, online & face-to-face), then cash in.
• Separate web visitors to new visitors vs. recurring visitors.
• Quality + Consistency = Loyalty.
• Social Media is not about you, it’s about your customers.

The State of Social Media Marketing
Roy Young, MarketingProfs | Tim McAtee, MarketingProfs

• Earned media (= social media) vs. paid media.
• Percent of companies using social media marketing similar for B2C vs. B2B companies.
• Main goal of Facebook marketing is to drive traffic to web site.
• Facebook applications work best for B2C, fan surveys work best for B2B.
• Free web measurement services (e.g. Googla Analytics) still most commonly used (75%) than paid tools. But they also score very high on effectiveness.
• Steady trend towards greater restriction in social media policies as company size increases.

Design for Behavior Change: Why Facebook & Twitter are Winning
Dr. BJ Fogg, Stanford University

• Motivation: pleasure/pain, hope/fear, social acceptance/rejection.
• Ability: facilitate by simplifying (not training) based on: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine.
• Trigger: hot vs cold.
• Behavior change as ritual: routine or reflex.

Advanced SEO Tips
Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts

• SEO = architecture + content + link building.
• http://www.seo-browser.com -> shows your page the way spiders see it.
• http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape -> approximates PageRank (mozRank) for your page.
• http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp -> checks redirect status (301 is good = passes PageRank).

More Stuff …
Also, check out Aneta Hall’s post with the best tweets from the event.

Not too long ago I followed a nice discussion on Ken Burbary’s blog about social media monitoring tools. Ken had come along some noticeable inconsistencies in the results reported by two leading social media platforms, namely Radian6 and Alterian/Techrigy SM2. Since we have been working here at Covisio with both of these tools for a while now, I agreed to post a few numbers based on our own experience from a real-world listening campaign that we are currently running for one of our clients in the enterprise software space.

Before moving on, a couple of disclaimers:

• My purpose is not to rate one tool vis-a-vis the other. As a matter of fact we have used both tools successfully to help clients with their marketing plans and that’s what really matters at the end. For this analysis here, we used the standard Radian6 version with one (paid) user account login to have access to the system (but no paid topic profile) and the Freemium version of SM2 – a setup similar to what a user evaluating both platforms might come up with (though both Radian6 and SM2 do offer 7-day trial versions of their full products).
• The results are from just a single project; they by no means constitute an all-inclusive comparative analysis of the two platforms. By the way, here’s a pretty detailed post by Jason Falls actually comparing the use of Radian6 to ScoutLabs, another social media monitoring tool.
• I understand there are differences between the two technologies in terms of what sources they use to pull data from and what internal technologies they use to classify the data and produce their reports. So I am aware that some variation in the reported results is to be expected. But how much is too much?

Now, we monitored data from 4 searches across all media types and for a period of 30 days:

• Search #1: company name.
• Search #2: industry term.
• Search #3: industry term.
• Search #4: product acronym (with a set of keywords to exclude as well as a set of source urls to filter out).

So, let’s look at what the tools came back with.

The first overview graph shows significant variations in the number of results returned from each tool with Radian6 consistently returning more items than SM2 (from 50% more to 450% more). The overlap (defined as per search, the # of same results divided by the # of total results from the tool that produced the lesser # of results) in the results of the two tools ranges anywhere between 30% (for a product acronym search with lots of noise) to 100% (for a straightforward company name search).

The second and third drill-down graphs show serious inconsistencies as well. Radian6 indicates that the predominant media type is blogs, while SM2 indicates that the predominant media types are either Twitter or “other”.

The bottom-line is that there are both quantitative and qualitative variations in the results reported by Radian6 and Alterian/Techrigy SM2 for the same search profiles. And there is limited overlap in the reported results, which seems to indicate that the search spaces covered by the two tools are very dissimilar. This to me is understandable, but I would expect to be able to adapt the tools (one way being by configuring their url filters, i.e. what urls to include and what to exclude) so that they start converging at least to identifying and tracking the most relevant conversations within an industry. At the end, although it is clear that social media technologies are still evolving, it is also clear that social media monitoring tools can be made extremely useful to (marketing, branding, customer service, R&D, legal, etc.) organizations, but not without a well-thought-of human investment to understand the results, interpret the findings, and take proper actions.

P.S. I am planning a follow-up post to discuss some of the things we learned when evaluating these social media monitoring tools and planning social media listening campaigns.

UPDATED (9/22/09): For a more complete analysis on the above social media monitoring results from Radian6 and Alterian / Techrigy SM2 towards the quality vs. the quantity of the results, here’s another graph on the relevancy of the results reported from each tool.

The graph shows that both tools deliver over 85% of relevant results for normal searches, but noise margins rise significantly for more involved searches (for example in search #4 the main keyword is a software product acronym that is our interest, but the keyword also matches names of religious groups, scientific techniques, and schools; despite the fact that the search has been configured in both tools to exclude results that contain certain keywords or are sourced from certain urls, the noise margin is still very high). More involved searches obviously require better optimized and more regularly updated search configurations to filter out irrelevant items based on context and source in order to maintain acceptable relevancy in the tools’ reported results.

Last month, Matt Dickman on Techno//Marketer kicked off a great conversation on the need to treat content as commerce. In the post, he outlined a few key steps to succeeding with content-driven sites:

1. Create a clear interface for your users.
2. Rank your site’s content in the order it is valuable to the business and weigh that with the value to the consumer.
3. Visualize your traffic to see where it is going and shift it to the content you value.
4. Track and adopt over time.

What intrigued me here was the ensuing discussion on how to actually assign value to that content. Matt argues that the values can be arbitrary (with some level of executive agreement/approval) as long as the process is helping to more effectively manage the site. Others argued that there was little value in made-up figures. The only consensus seemed to be that this would be a very good, but very difficult exercise. In other words: a nonstarter.

This is unfortunate because placing value on content is something that can and must be done, and it need not be arbitrary. The goal of content marketing and social media marketing is to shift the majority of lead generation from outbound, interruption-based sales calls to inbound, permission-based activities. Only great content with clear value will allow you to successfully make this transition.

In the traditional marketing model we forecast, budget, and meticulously calculate our cost-per-lead in order to convey to senior management marketing’s contribution to top line revenue. What this process has given us is a wealth of known data to pull from so as to attempt to quantify (within a certain range) the value of our online content assets.

Here is an approach that we have used in a few cases with clients from the technology sector when trying to evaluate the ROI of online content for increasing/accelerating sales. What we do is map the content assets to the different intended stakeholders (CxO, business line manager, technical lead, end user) and the different stages of the selling cycle (Research, Consider, Evaluate, Select) and then try to approximate the bottom line impact of each content asset throughout its lifecycle. We base this value on the data we already have: cost-per-lead, cost-of-sales, and customer support costs.

A few examples:

Of course this is to be treated just as a base point, the exact details depending on particular industry & company specifics. Also, in some cases it’s worth expanding outside the selling cycle to include the impact of content to the customer lifecycle overall and/or factoring in the cost of creating and producing the content assets in order to produce a fuller picture.

No one would argue that we are faced with a new paradigm where content and messaging are no longer fully contained or controlled by marketing. However, saying that this makes it just too difficult to measure the value of content that is driving critical inbound leads is just doing marketers a disservice.

I was speaking to one of my clients about a potential podcast series as part of their social media initiative. He informs me that he knows of a great vendor who produces podcasts – and, at $3,000 a pop, they are a total bargain. My first thought: are podcasts lux items now?

I think podcasts are a great thing. They provide a terrific way for vendors to tap industry experts who are almost always willing to share their insights to produce a high quality piece that will bring value to their target market. That is my theory anyway, but perhaps I am wrong because podcast after podcast that I download from technology vendors, I notice a couple of things.

1. The production value of a Ryan Seacrest-like voice coupled with a slick instrumental techno music intro usually outweighs the value of the podcast content.

2. Podcasts are most often used as direct sales tool rather than a knowledge tool that shares subject matter expertise to build brand and reputation.

The point here is not to belittle the value of podcast producers or to diss that great interview with your product manager about the features of your company’s new widget. The point is to stop thinking of podcasts simply as audio collateral but rather as a valuable tool for your social media initiatives to generate conversation and engage your audience.

Paul Dunay, one of my favorite bloggers, recently posted 5 Tips for Optimizing your Facebook Marketing. In it, he recommends the syndication of your podcast series as a way to provide rich content to your Facebook Fan page. The pity with that great post is that he put the most salient point at the end:

“While the costs of social marketing are low don’t let that fool you. The true cost is found in the creation of content. And your key to success will be the consistent participation and willingness to engage your customers you can create by using great content.”

I have another client who had absolutely no budget for their podcast series. My advice to them: great, let’s get going on it then. Podcast tools are free. Great content costs time, effort, motivation and the open-mindedness to do a few things that may seem counter-intuitive:

Find people your audience wants to listen to: In most cases, this means going outside your organizations to find those industry experts who are generating conversation. Smart people understand the value of sharing their expertise and in more cases than not, you will find willing participants.

Talk about hot button issues: This means letting go of that need to directly promote your company and its products. Let the participant choose the topic he or she wants to discuss, even if it has nothing directly to do with your offerings. Smart vendors are part of the conversation; they don’t use the conversation for blatant promotion.

Be prepared: This means knowing who you are talking to. Study your participant’s blogs, articles, presentations etc. and prepare thoughtful insightful questions. There is nothing worse than an interviewer asking simplistic, high level questions and being unable to engage once an answer is given.

Understand that it’s not about you (yet): Just forget about promoting your company. Instead, promote the podcast subject matter and its participant. Give a killer intro and explain why and how your participant brings value. Close by providing links to the participant’s blog, notifying the audience of the participant’s books or publications, asking the audience to connect with the participant via twitter, letting everyone know where the participant will be speaking next, etc.

Web 2.0 enable your podcasts: Think of your podcast library as a blog and set it up like one. Make the most out of your efforts by allowing your audience to easily find, share, bookmark, comment, and subscribe to the available content.

Set your priorities straight: With today’s slashed marketing budgets, think wisely about where you want to spend your limited dollars. It’s tempting to want to put your podcast in a glossy wrapper, but is having your podcast take place in a sound studio with original music really adding any value to anyone?

Following up to my discussion on the value (or lack thereof) of email marketing in today’s environment from an earlier blog posting, here are the six things you definitely need to have thought through before launching an email campaign.

1. Goal. “What is it in for ALL?” Don’t forget that email is a touch point for potential and existing customers. You are actually reaching people out there, who may actually take time out of their busy schedule to read what you wrote to them. Never bug these people without a clear goal in mind for you but also for them. So, make sure you are prepared to bring real and tangible value to your recipients to make it worth their time and interest. Having a goal is also key to being able to measure the performance of your campaign afterwards.

2. List. Send your email message to a list that is both opted-in and highly-targeted to what you are offering. Interrupting via email without having the recipient’s permission is one of the quickest ways to alienate prospects and customers, says email marketing consultant Simms Jenkins, author of The Truth about Email Marketing (FT Press, 2008) in a recent Marketing Profs article. Same applies when your message is not in line with the needs and profiles of your list members.

3. Content. You need to be able to convey value that makes an important and immediate difference to your recipients. And you need to do that in a clear and concise manner with actual proof points that what you are talking about is tangible and not marketing fluff. Also, make it easy for your recipients to engage with you via clear calls to action, specific landing pages, and options to interact online.

4. Tactics. There is a tremendous amount of empirical research and best practices on the web covering subject lines, “from” lines, optimal sizes of messages, message formats and layouts, availability of text versions of messages, best days/times to send emails, and detailed ways to test your email campaign to name a few. These do make a difference, so please follow them.

5. Metrics. Unless you measure it, you cannot improve on it. Marketing needs to be able to justify its ROI, so measuring the performance of email campaigns is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have. You should track bounce rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and costs per conversion, and then optimize accordingly. And you should track these metrics for each target audience or emailing list you are going after.

6. Respect. Make sure you are honest and clear in your email message, you leave no room in the language you use to potentially trick or deceive your recipients, you support Sender Policy Framework (SPF) in your DNS, and you adhere to all types of compliance defined in the CAN-SPAM act. This is not a detail, it is as important as respect is for successful business relationships.