I've been sending around (and I apologize if anyone considers it flogging) my recent article on PBS MediaShift (where I've also been consulting in audience and revenue development) titled "Email Is Far From Dead."
The point, in a nutshell, is that email, in the words of one source, is still the single most effective marketing tool in digital media, even if social networks like Twitter and Facebook have started to take some of the share and the glory. The point is that as a business communication tool email still rules, and if you're a publisher or a marketer you can't afford to ignore it, if you want to reach and build your audience and/or customer base; it's by definition a loyal audience or customer base that has opted in to receive your messages.
One thing I didn't include in the piece was examples from my personal life to show that email isn't going to die among the young, either. Yes, my teenage daughter is on Facebook and AIM and instant messaging, and she may use other chat and social tools as well. But she also has an email, and in fact uses her email at times as her chat interface, for example on Google's Gchat service either for text, voice or video. On her Blackberry (yes, she has one), she uses email, and she also uses computers and an iPod Touch but will access email on all of them. Our younger nine-year-old also uses email, and through her Gmail does chats. I have seen that my children's friends are using email, too.
Another point is that the social networks are a stream, and tend to push anything older down. Whenever someone logs into Facebook or their Twitter client they see what's current, and may not bother scrolling very far down. In email, on the other hand, people tend to scroll all the way back to the last message they've seen. Even if something you sent is days old, there's a good chance it will get at least glanced at. (I see the results here in clickthroughs from emails for days, sometimes weeks, after we send one out from various sites I help.)
True, there are dangers in extrapolating from personal experience to larger trends, and email is not at the crux of at least my older daughter's personal communications. Email is not her main way of communicating, but it's still an important tool and as she gets old enough to start being a more educated consumer, email will probably still be a way to reach her with one-to-one communications, one of the important channels.
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Experimenting With Openness in Academe
Today, I've made public the social network my students and I used in my MBA-level digital marketing class at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch. (I first gave the students multiple chances and notices to delete any material they did not want the world to see -- during the class, whose grading period formally ended yesterday, I wanted all to be in a "safe" environment free from possible embarrassment, employment risks, etc.). It's here, including dozens of links to articles, etc, from the students and me.
This was an experiment. I tried to at least stick our toes in the water with the kinds of openness so many of our readings and lessons touted; as for politicians, so too for companies. Eventually, it seems, dissonance between public persona and private reality will eventually come out -- whether Wall Street analysts recommending one way publicly and another in private, political misdeeds or, even, the ever-secretive world of private equity.
I admit some misgivings about making all this public. After all, if I let anyone see the syllabus and my responses to assignments and readings, what’s to stop anyone from just taking that material and using it as their own (I created this course and it’s MY intellectual property, no?). On the other hand, I have to acknowledge that I reached out to a network on Linked In and got a dozen or so helpful responses from others who shared their thoughts and expertise when I was constructing the course. I found the textbook we used through an Amazon.com recommendation on another book someone had recommended. And I hope any embarrassment I might face over revealing my comments and so on will more than be made up for by insights from others who weigh in. I am, in a sense, forcing myself to improve, to keep learning, to make the class be better next time I teach it.
My department chair, too, has experimented with a Ning network for the marketing department, but others in the university guard their syllabi like Faberge eggs, and demand that students neither record nor post nor mention what’s happened in class, on a test and so on. As we see pressure for openness from digital technologies in other fields, we see it too, in the world of academe. A number of business schools have started posting material openly online.
As for the students, I found it intriguing how some took to the network avidly -- one even helped reconstruct the network to make it more useful -- while others shied from it and continually sent me private notes I encouraged them to make public. The students' weekly assignments were posted publicly, as were discussions, videos and more. Many enhanced and commented ib each others' material (some of course, tried to shirk assignments by simply commenting on what colleagues said.) I can say that I learned from the students' public sharing in a way I might not have had they not shared and discussed with each other, and the level of discussion improved both on the network and in class, as well. It's been a learning experience for me, and I believe the next classes I teach will be enhanced. I also hope the experience for students will continually get better.
One point that didn't work: I had started the class hoping the reading list would change and meld over time as we shared and enhanced each others’ readings and discussion. That part of the experiment didn’t completely work, in part because many of the students are very busy -- with other courses, full-time jobs, families -- and preferred to have a more pre-set structure telling them exactly what to expect throughout the term. I’d be grateful for suggestions here.
This was an experiment. I tried to at least stick our toes in the water with the kinds of openness so many of our readings and lessons touted; as for politicians, so too for companies. Eventually, it seems, dissonance between public persona and private reality will eventually come out -- whether Wall Street analysts recommending one way publicly and another in private, political misdeeds or, even, the ever-secretive world of private equity.
I admit some misgivings about making all this public. After all, if I let anyone see the syllabus and my responses to assignments and readings, what’s to stop anyone from just taking that material and using it as their own (I created this course and it’s MY intellectual property, no?). On the other hand, I have to acknowledge that I reached out to a network on Linked In and got a dozen or so helpful responses from others who shared their thoughts and expertise when I was constructing the course. I found the textbook we used through an Amazon.com recommendation on another book someone had recommended. And I hope any embarrassment I might face over revealing my comments and so on will more than be made up for by insights from others who weigh in. I am, in a sense, forcing myself to improve, to keep learning, to make the class be better next time I teach it.
My department chair, too, has experimented with a Ning network for the marketing department, but others in the university guard their syllabi like Faberge eggs, and demand that students neither record nor post nor mention what’s happened in class, on a test and so on. As we see pressure for openness from digital technologies in other fields, we see it too, in the world of academe. A number of business schools have started posting material openly online.
As for the students, I found it intriguing how some took to the network avidly -- one even helped reconstruct the network to make it more useful -- while others shied from it and continually sent me private notes I encouraged them to make public. The students' weekly assignments were posted publicly, as were discussions, videos and more. Many enhanced and commented ib each others' material (some of course, tried to shirk assignments by simply commenting on what colleagues said.) I can say that I learned from the students' public sharing in a way I might not have had they not shared and discussed with each other, and the level of discussion improved both on the network and in class, as well. It's been a learning experience for me, and I believe the next classes I teach will be enhanced. I also hope the experience for students will continually get better.
One point that didn't work: I had started the class hoping the reading list would change and meld over time as we shared and enhanced each others’ readings and discussion. That part of the experiment didn’t completely work, in part because many of the students are very busy -- with other courses, full-time jobs, families -- and preferred to have a more pre-set structure telling them exactly what to expect throughout the term. I’d be grateful for suggestions here.
Sometimes It's Just Thinking Intelligently
ROI ROI ROI. (Which if you're French-speaking is king king king, but in the media/ad world is "return on investment.") A surprisingly vague term which basically means somehow getting more money from the stuff you advertise or spend on than the money you put in. Notoriously hard to figure out. But an obsession in today's digital media/measurability world.
Over on Congoo, where I've probably posted for the last time this year, I wrote of the steps MediaEdge took for a large retailer to get customers to take action based on where they were in the buying process for a large consumer item. Really, what the folks at MediaEdge did was simply think it through: If someone's searching a generic term like "washing machine" they're earlier in the process than if they search a specific brand name. So, for the former you give more information, and a way to get them interested, and for the latter you hit them with more of a "buy now" kind of message, perhaps discounting or other types of actionable
information, like where and how to find a store and buy the machine, call an 800 number and so on. It's smart, and really comes down to adding intelligence -- as in human thinking -- to the machine bits and bytes process.
That's the kind of high-end work people are supposed to do. And sometimes, it's really simple if you just think a bit.
Over on Congoo, where I've probably posted for the last time this year, I wrote of the steps MediaEdge took for a large retailer to get customers to take action based on where they were in the buying process for a large consumer item. Really, what the folks at MediaEdge did was simply think it through: If someone's searching a generic term like "washing machine" they're earlier in the process than if they search a specific brand name. So, for the former you give more information, and a way to get them interested, and for the latter you hit them with more of a "buy now" kind of message, perhaps discounting or other types of actionable
information, like where and how to find a store and buy the machine, call an 800 number and so on. It's smart, and really comes down to adding intelligence -- as in human thinking -- to the machine bits and bytes process.
That's the kind of high-end work people are supposed to do. And sometimes, it's really simple if you just think a bit.
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