Alterian's SM2 hits the NIU campus!

This past week and a half we have had Alterian in our classroom twice in Marketing Technology to learn about how to analyze social media data. We learned some general background on social media and then learned the SM2 tool for use in the class project. What I learned is that it is important to look at not only frequency of mention as well as sentiment. Those companies that were ranked highest in mentions for the Super Bowl were not necessarily those that ranked highest in terms of sentiment.

Using SM2 I also realized how much of an art as well as a science these tools are. Looking through the social media postings for a particular topic I got a good feeling for the company I was researching in terms of their major competitors and how people think about the brand. As a quantitative researcher I was worried about how representative the sample was and how to really quantify some of this 'squishy' data. Still, SM2 is helpful in understanding how people think about your brand and we have emphasized the importance of technology for brand building in our class.

Is social media monitoring 'squishy' or valuable?

Interview Tips from Meet the Firm Night at NIU

I heard the following panel speak on career advice for new graduates on Monday, February 7 at NIU's Meet the Firm Night:

Drew Butts, Enterprise Holdings, Matt McClusky, Aerotek, Erin Quinlan, McKesson Pharmaceutical Group, Jerry Keyes, White Lodging

The panel gave some good advice for new graduates and said some things I have noticed myself. One, they said that students on their resumes need to indicate how they can help the company, not what the company can do for them. The panel also said to be careful asking about time off, salary and vacation until the company brings these things up. Asking these questions too soon makes it seem like you are only interested in benefits and not benefiting the company. Finally, I noticed that the panel did not appreciate job candidates that do not do research before the interview. It is great to go in with a problem and possible solution to show that you know what you are talking about and understand the company. Lynn Hazan is coming this week to talk to our students so we hope that she will give us some other great ideas. Feel free to post other interview tips.

Yahoo and AOL jockey for brand positions

We have been talking in class about the large web portals. Yahoo and AOL are struggling to create a unique, differentiating brand positioning and losing users compared to Google and Facebook. In class, we suggested that Yahoo could beef up its emphasis on media but it looks like AOL is planning take that brand positioning with the recent purchase of the Huffington Post. I heard in a podcast by The Economist today that AOL hired more new journalists that any other media outlet this past year, about 700. So what's left for Yahoo?

Yahoo's number of unique users rose last year but the amount of time spent dropped by 10 percent. Facebook's time spent increased by 79 percent and Facebook also boasts some of the most loyal users in the business.

In class we talked about another possible positioning for Yahoo being extending the 'My Yahoo' concept and this week the Wall Street Journal this week (February 7th) reports that Yahoo is seeking to beef up the site's personalized content, particularly for mobile iPhone and Android applications, creating online mobile magazines unique to each user. Will this approach work?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704858404576129161854139964.html

Students learn Google Adwords this week

We are moving into a phase of the course where we will be preparing our project plan for the Restuarant.com project and some students may choose to run a google adwords campaign. So we delved into adwords as a program in a bit more detail this week, I thought the most interesting aspect of the adwords videos we looked at was the notion of having ads that are specific and include what we would call in 'direct marketing' a 'call to action.' For example, for a Valentine's Day ad include specific information on the ad, like free shipping on roses if you click now, rather than just posting an ad for a florist shop.

Keywords selected that are tightly tied to the ad are also likely to improve quality score. It always amazes me how many advertisers still don't adhere to these good principles, particularly using a destination URL or landing page to track their campaign. Here is a link to one of the videos with some good tips for adwords.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djjN9zZNkYI&feature=channel

Defining Direct Marketing in an Interactive Age

Ron Jacobs of Jacks & Clevenger asks us to define Direct Marketing for our new world of multichannel, interactive media in the latest copy of CADM's ADMARKS. I like the DMA definition because it includes multiple media, a database and our old DM friend, measurability. Any Comments?

•An organized and planned system of contacts

•Using a variety of media

•Seeking to produce a lead or an order

•Developing and maintaining a database

•Measurable in cost and results

•Expandable with confidence (DMA)

I think that this definition does not include some of the aspects of interactive marketing such as collaborative social media tools that are not in total control of the marketer.

Marketing Automation is the next phase of internet marketing

Tuesday in class we talked about maketing automation. We looked at an example from Allstate where they are using marketing technology to improve their lead capture and demand generation process.

I said that I had watched internet marketing evolve from static banner ads, to email marketing, to search engine marketing, to interactive and well-placed contextual advertising, to social media marketing and now to the point where marketers want to track and measure the results of all their efforts on an integrated media 'dashboard.' We will have Acton software demonstrate their solution and have also looked at some material from Marketo. We analyzed Exact Target's stated positioning statement from their web site and see that that company also wants to be an integrated marketing solution.

I then asked a discussion question for next Thursday: What would a dashboard for your Restaurant.com project look like? Do you agree that marketing automation is the next phase in the evolution of the internet marketing?

Mktg Tech Class learns salesforce and salesgenie interfaces

This week I reviewed the class sales genie assignment. The assignment was to search salesgenie and download not more than 100 leads of companies that might be of interest for a career search.

Although some had trouble with the search interface to begin with, students were favorably impressed with the amount of information that could be downloaded in a short period of time. Almost everyone said the biggest challenge was figuring out what they wanted to do, what kind of company they wanted to target, not the tool itself.

We have been talking about strategy in class regarding marketing technology and I would ask you to think about yourselves in this context as you enter the job market. That is to say, what makes you unique and what can you offer?

There will be some more sales genie sign up times as we work on the project. Let me know if you want to do some more searches. You have a unique opportunity to use your salesforce.com login to manage your job search this semester. We loaded the salesgenie leads into salesforce and you can add others manually or through the uploading process.

So what makes you unique?

Restaurant.com project

Restaurant.com is a web-based ecommerce site that sells discounted gift certificates to local restaurants and we are doing a project with them. We will act as affiliates and drive traffic to their site. A portion of the proceeds will be then donated to charity. Restaurant.com uses most of the media channels we have talked about in class in driving traffic to its site.

In the project we ask you to plan, implement and measure the results of two media channels. What types of media channels are most effective today? We will see next week that companies are working to integrate information across channels so marketers can measure more effectively.

Salesgenie.com and salesforce.com

This week we used both salesgenie.com and salesforce.com to pull down leads (salesgenie) and upload them into a contact management software (salesforce). Leads can be purchased or just acquired through natural interaction. I meet a lot of people and save their business cards so I can contact them later. I talked about how in my program I then transfer information into Exact Target, send emails and track back to salesforce.

These types of marketing automation programs often require transferring files in CSV (comma separated values) and we showed how to create those files in excel and work with them. This process may seem like a thankless task but is often how we get set up to do the marketing programs that we need to implement. Is there a better way?

Demand Generation

Marketing has evolved from just a few media channels to many and the customer is the focus as marketers move from push to pull. Demand generation refers to getting high quality leads into the top of the sales funnel. Leads may come from search, social, trade shows, in other words, a variety of marketing channels. Effective demand generation fuels growth.

In B2C, Dreamfield's Pasta uses SEO, PPC and WOM to attract customers and then uses email and social to continue involvement. The result has been growth in what might be considered a commodity product line, pasta.

B2B buyers are increasingly using search and word-of-mouth to make their purchasing decisions and involving the sales force at the end of the sales process. In this type of scenario, it becomes Marketing's responsibility to nurture the leads via multiple interactions and get the 'ripe' lead to the sales person at the right time. Sales and Marketing must work closer together than ever. How can companies overcome the traditional rivalry between the two groups?