Most marketing managers in small and medium-sized companies use an e-mail service provider like Constant Contact, MailChimp, emailr or AWeber. These services offer remarkable power, sometimes for free. But remember: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

You’re always treading the edge of the abuse-abyss. Don’t fall in.

Last week I received a message via Constant Contact from somebody who had merrily gone through LinkedIn, harvesting e-mail addresses of people in his network. I didn’t want the message, and I didn’t even feel enough affinity toward the person to contact him first and tell him that my objective in connecting with him had not been to get special offers from him.

Instead, I looked for and found the Report Abuse link at the bottom of the message. I hesitated for a moment…

Then I pulled the trigger.

Building your list

Keep in mind that there are a few ways to build your e-mail list:

• Readers want you. You can build a list with single opt-in. Readers click on a link, and they’re added to your list. Smart.
• Readers really want you. With double opt-in, readers click that link, then must validate their opt-in by clicking another link in a confirmation e-mail message the service sends them. Really smart.
• You want readers. You gather e-mail addresses and plop them into a database in the e-mail service. Dumb.

I wouldn’t recommend springing the last one even on readers and customers you’ve had for years. If your relationship with them is that strong, it will survive your explaining the move to a new e-mail system and your request that they opt in to keep in touch with you.

You turn an important, psychological corner when you go from e-mail sent directly from your desktop to an e-mail/newsletter service.

It’s a matter of trust, so it’s not wise to surprise people with this kind of thing.

The Abuse Complaint

A few minutes after reporting the abuse, I received an auto-responder from Constant Contact:

We have automatically logged your complaint in our system and will in-turn review the customer account in question. Constant Contact does not tolerate spam and takes all complaints against our customers very seriously. A member of our Compliance Team will follow-up with you only if additional information is required.

In addition, please know that your address has been permanently removed from this senders list.

You’ve probably never seen this side of the transaction, have you?

Real spammers don’t care about this, of course, but marketing managers just trying to do their job should. It’s a sign that you should rethink your shortcut to stay away from the abuse-abyss.

What e-mail abuse stories do you have? Let me know in the comments.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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When people look at a column of your tweets, can they tell who the intended audience is?

When they land on your Facebook page, can they scan your posts and figure out whether you’re talking to them or to the other half-billion people in the Face-sphere?

We expect that our followers in social media know something about us and our brand, and will be receptive to our tweets. If you’re Souplantation, you can assume that visitors know you’re making offers to hungry people, most of whom have hungry families to feed.

Addressing the envelope

But suppose you’ve been developing and writing to buyer personas, as Michele Linn and David Meerman Scott have enjoined you to do all these years. You put in place a content marketing campaign aimed at your ideal readers, then use tweets and posts to point them to it.

Are you making it drop-dead easy for them to know that you’re talking to them?

Are you addressing the envelope?

Sacrifice a few precious characters in the name of targeting. For example:

• Sysadmins: Security holes in Windows 7; plug ‘em now http://… #hashtag
• MobileAppDevelopers: Still time to register for devconf at http://…
• Mktgmgrs: You tweetin’ to me? Huh? http://… #hashtag1 #hashtag2
• AngryBirders: Two new cheats revealed http://…
• navyseals: Thanks, good job. Don’t tell us – we don’t want to know how you did it

What happens when you don’t address the envelope like this? People assume you’re talking to your “following” – whatever that is – but what about those of us who don’t yet know whether we’re in your following?

Explicitly addressing your tweets and posts is an easy way of qualifying the members of your audience and letting them know whom you’re trying to attract to your following. If I’m not a mktgmgr, sysadmin or navyseal, then I know your message doesn’t apply to me.

And we all appreciate anything you can do to help us cut through the clutter.

*(With apologies to Robert DeNiro as Travis in “Taxi Driver”)

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: sludgegulper

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Marketing managers tread the razor’s edge between sending followers too much content and sending them too little.

Here’s research from Exact Target and CoTweet:

The most frequently cited (44%) reason Facebook users give for “unliking” a brand is that it posts too frequently.

Oops, marketing managers. Better not post too often. It looks like nagging or chest-thumping, and that’s not what we want to see on Facebook.

On the other hand – and we should always be thankful we have one of those – is research from MailChimp and Hubspot on the Science of Email Marketing. It draws conclusions from 9.5 billion (with a “b”) e-mail messages sent in campaigns worldwide:

• The click-through rate at one send per month is 6%, and the click-through rate for everything from 2 to 30 sends per month varies from 5% down to 2%. Not much of a penalty for sending a lot of e-mail. (Slide 40)
• If you send 1-5 e-mail messages per month, your unsubscribe rate will be between .7% and .2%. Any more frequently than that and it drops as low as .1%. This fairly encourages more contact. (Slide 41)

Hubspot’s takeaway:

Don’t be afraid to send too much e-mail.

And, when it comes to blogging, the decisions you make about posting frequency are much more subtle, depending on whether you’re after influence, traffic, comments, pagerank or reader engagement.

Of course, this assumes you’re not posting/sending the same content over and over. If that’s your strategy for wooing followers, you’d better try Twitter instead.

So, don’t worry if you and your marketing team are having doubts as to how much content marketing volume to push in social media, because each channel marches to the beat of its own drum. And even then, it’s as much art as science.

If you wanted hard-and-fast rules, you should have gone into engineering.

This is marketing, and that’s why we call it that.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Serge Melki

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Social media marketing seems like smoke and mirrors, but when the smoke blows away and you take down the mirrors, you still need to hire a writer who can deliver valuable content.

Social media marketing is an exercise in riding the tiger.

The buzz is that the traditional, prescriptive notions of marketing don’t fit very well in social media, and so marketing managers need to cede some control to the crowd. Let your customers tell you what they like about you and want from you, then give it to them in short, quick bursts and hope that you’re building relationships and spreading the word.

Some ad agencies like Crispin Porter & Bogusky have turned their home pages into “part Website, part digital fishing net.” In the last century, the equivalent might have been to offer free beer all day long in the lobby of your corporate office, or to let complete strangers answer the phone.

So you’re trying to convince your traditional-minded boss to let you run the company through this social media thingee. You know that “Because it’s fun” and “Everybody’s doing it” won’t fly as cornerstones of a social media strategy, so you have to explain tweets, back-links, followings and a Squidoo lens in classical marketing terms.

(Mind you, we are probably the last generation that will need to do this. In the future, people are just going to understand it without explanation.)

A Social Media Program for Traditional Marketers

Pete Caputa of Hubspot writes:

Based on my daily interactions with marketing agencies, I believe we’ve finally reached the point where convincing companies that they need to be using social media to build awareness, audiences, traffic and leads is almost over.

Now it’s about being able to speak to them in terms they understand (rather than in terms our social media peers understand), to explain why a social media strategy is absolutely necessary.

Pete describes a new e-book from Channel V Media that bridges the voodoo of the vehicles (remember that Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit and the others are only vehicles) and the traditional approach to marketing. Its goal is to help companies and marketers develop a social media plan with a foot in both camps.

-Audience Identification
-Platform Development and Design
-Brand Campaign Integration
-Content Creation/Coordination
-Goal Mapping
-Brand Identity
-Audience Attraction
-Social Media Listening
-Community and Social Responsibility
-Internal/External Community Engagement
-Brand Advocacy
-Customer Service

Marketing Writers and Social Media

In particular, the fourth bullet concerns your writers. Are they thinking too traditionally to fit in with your social media marketing plan? Do they know what to do with your keyword basket? Can they develop the content you need for these social media channels, and the brave new expectations of the people at the other end of them?

• You still need content. Whether you opt for a white paper or a free sample, you need to tell your story somehow.
• That content will still come from marketing writers you hire. Managing your social media strategy will be plenty of work for you already.
• The marketing writers have to write in new ways so that the content is valuable. Every sentence has to answer the reader’s question, “Why should I care?”
• Not valuable to you; valuable to your customers and the people with whom they share. They don’t want to share your brochure. They want to share something that will make people follow them.

The essence of social media is that somebody will read your story and share it.

Your marketing writers need to get that.

photo credit: L. Lew

Related posts:

1. 6 Social Media Business Channels
2. Social Media Engineering??

6 new channels!

Hire a writer who understands that the social media business story is still warming up, and that it consists of several different channels.

How is your business using social media in all its channels? More importantly, how are the people inside your business using them?

I hope you are past the notion that this is all about a bunch of teenagers exchanging gossip, or that this is just “the new t.v.”? There are plenty of social media business success stories, including these compiled about Twitter by MarketingProfs.

There’s a strangely inverse relationship between business and social media:

• Business starts out as being about money, but ends up being about relationships.
• Social media channels starts out as being about relationships, and end up being about money (if you play them right).

Your Social Media Business in 6 Channels

So, what is your business in social media? Can you tell the players? Do you even have a program yet?

Heather Lutze of the Findability Group summarized social media for business as being in 6 main channels (as of this summer, anyway). With a tip of the hat to Heather, here’s my supplement to her summary:

1. LinkedIn – ranks well in search engines, strong focus on business and professional content, good place to describe your company.
2. Facebook – not as useful for search engine marketing because the personal pages are not indexed (group pages, however, are indexed). Facebook started out as strong in personal networking (think colleges and margaritas) and has gained a lot of momentum by facilitating business-to-consumer relationships.
3. MySpace – The social media darling of yesteryear, its reputation has not benefited much from news items detailing bad behavior among its users. Hey, it’s what we had first, so we all saw what we could get away with. Got a band? Be on MySpace.
4. YouTube – Yes, you too can market yourself with video; just ask Blendtec. You can also screw it up if you’re not careful; just ask Bank of America. Well indexed for search engines. Not as easy as updating a LinkedIn profile, but you may as well try something new in your organization. It’s the 21st century, after all.
5. Blogging – Search engines love blogs (constantly updated content), your customers love blogs (if you’re really creating a relationship with them and not just breathing your own exhaust) and your search engine marketing effort loves blogs (new ways to explore the keywords prospects use to find you). Blogging is a lot of work. So is business. Remember?
6. Twitter – Zen meets the Internet. Don’t try to control Twitter; just ride it as best you can. It’s its own best search engine, and you can find information, trends and opinions there as they arise.

Tell Your Story in Social Media Terms

Once you’ve decided on the channel(s) you want to approach, you’ll need content, because whatever you may do in social media, you need to tell your story eventually. Your marketing communication writers need to get your message out consistently and to a variety of audiences.

You cannot fill your Social Media channels with brochure copy. Nobody on the Web cares about you, your company or your products; they care about what you can do for them and their problems.

When you hire a writer for social media in business, you need to start and maintain a conversation in a new language, and not just re-hash your strengths. Your Web content writer needs to understand your message and tailor it to as many different channels as you select.

What do you think about these social media business channels? Where and how are you casting your lot?

photo credit: avlxyz

Related posts:

1. Social Media Engineering??
2. Search Engine Optimized or Ideal Reader Optimized?

What about optimizing your content for your Ideal Reader, though? It’s easy to fill your Website or blog posts with text written around keywords you’ve pulled straight out of Google’s Adwords Tool or Wordtracker.

But are you throwing out the baby with the bathwater when you focus more on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) than on RLPs (Real, Live Persons)?

Search Engine Optimization Is…

A potential business partner in Asia unveiled new Web content. “I would appreciate your thoughts on our site,” she wrote me.

I had a look at the site. It’s obvious to me that they hired a marketing writer to talk about the company’s features, benefits and “core competencies” (yecch). It’s an atrocious throwback to the days when the Web was just an electronic brochure onto which we all heaped our specialties and tried to shout the loudest. I can’t stand it, and might even consider it a liability if I were evaluating her company against her competitors.

Nevertheless, search engine optimization is in love with her Website.

• The copy is sufficiently filled with keywords to demonstrate authority (q.v. Brian Clark), though not oppressively.
• The site is well structured, including sitemaps on each page.
• The pages weigh in at the optimal 250-500 words each.
• There are links within the site for more detailed explanations of the company’s process and technology.

At least for the time being, search engine optimization is quite happy that they’ve submitted this site. It will need refreshed content before long, so that the search engines do not become bored with it, but otherwise, it embodies the main principles of SEO quite well. (I wish I could give you the link, but I consider it bad form to criticize publicly in this manner.)

Ideal Reader Optimization Is…

Do you know what your readers want from you? Do you know what they want to read? Are you giving it to them?

It’s easy to write about what your company does; it’s vastly harder to write about what your audience wants to read, because you have to know them well, or ask them what they want. Then you have to believe them when they tell you, then you have to hire a writer who can tell your story in a way that they want to read.

What’s the easiest thing in the world to write? A letter to someone you care about. Why? Because you know how to tell your story through filters that mean something to him or her. You already have a relationship in place, and the letter becomes one more piece of that relationship.

First One, Then the Other

You need to build your online presence around keywords and Search Engine Optimization. They cast the wide net that brings you readers, followers, future customers and fellow travelers.

Once you’ve hit your stride and have a mutual relationship with a body of readers, you pursue Ideal Reader Optimization. You stop worrying about embedding keywords in your titles and h1 tags and using “2-3 keyword phrases 2-3 times per page.” You come up with better titles that capture people’s imagination in a way that keywords cannot. You will lose some of the original audience, but that’s how it goes.

So, what are you hiring your marketing communications writer to do: Search Engine Optimization or Ideal Reader Optimization?

photo credit: kainr

Related posts:

1. “This Paper Is a (Keyword) Basket Case.”

It’s not easy to keep your content machine fed, is it?

You’re finding out that providing valuable content to your readers really does take some work, doesn’t it?

When you were a kid, responsible for the family dog, your mom would holler up the staircase, “Timmy! It’s time to feed the dog again!” You remember that, don’t you? There’s a cosmic reason that “dog” rhymes with “blog,” and your responsibility is nearly the same.

Whether it’s the company blog or a content marketing campaign or even an e-newsletter, somebody has to write the stuff, somebody has to chase the stuff and somebody has to keep it moving along. Those somebodies are usually you, the marketing manager.

You begin to get a bit disillusioned.

• If you haven’t yet seen results, you’re wondering, “When should I pull the plug?”
• If you’re seeing results, you’re wondering, “How do I keep this up?”

Here are three things you need to remember when you get tired of feeding the blog:

1. You need to work with People who Love to Write. Even if you hire a writer to generate content about your niche technology for deep packet inspection and pay her handsomely, she can get tired of it in a hurry and run out of things to say and ways in which to say them. A true Lover of Writing will not suffer from this disease.
2. You need to Write for the Audience. Actually, if you’re not writing for the audience – for its questions and worries and headaches – then what’s the point? You can feed the blog candy just to see it get fat, or you can feed it something nutritious that will preserve it and increase its value to the audience. Besides, the more you know about your audience, the easier it is to keep your blog fed.
3. You, your company and your writers need to Write About What You Know About, and you need to be prepared to convey it persuasively for months, maybe for years. I came across this point in an article by Lloyd Brown last week:
   

   If you try to discuss the benefits of the acai berry when your only knowledge is what you read on another blog, the broader community is going to realize that you have nothing unique to offer. All they have done is burned a little of your bandwidth. Even worse is the abundance of blogs that simply import RSS feeds from other blogs to provide content. If you want visitors to stay longer than a few seconds and return at a later time, you must give them a reason. This means providing original content. The only way you can do this is if you know your subject.

Your blog won’t fetch sticks the way your dog did, but a well-fed one will fetch leads and attention. And, you don’t need to give it a bath.

photo credit: SpaceRitual

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Are you trying to nudge your engineering company into social media? Are you having trouble getting the engineers to go along with you?

Whaddya mean by that?

Social media marketing: Participating more or less actively on Twitter, Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn groups, wiki pages, blogs, videos, podcasts and the like. This is an effort designed to engage customers in a fast-moving, at times alarmingly public channel.

Engineering company: One that is known (both internally and externally) more for its technology than for its level of customer engagement. Your cell phone and computer are filled with the products of these companies, so if you look at the stamps on the components, you discover names like Broadcom, Seagate, LSI, Altera and countless others. Unlike Intel, which came out of the closet years ago by branding itself noisily with “Intel Inside,” most of these companies are pretty nameless and faceless, and may never see the wisdom in marketing through social media.

Get it: Devote internal resources to an organized effort at meeting customers in social media marketing channels, if only for a limited period of time to test the waters. “Getting it” should provide for ongoing activity once it has become obvious that customers are awake in these channels and paying attention.

Having defined it that way, here’s a suggestion as to how frame the debate:

Why engineering companies WILL be the last to get it

1. “Social media marketing” includes the word “marketing,” and engineers don’t much like or understand marketing.
2. Companies run by engineers still associate the entire category with MySpace, teenagers, and bored people letting the rest of the world know that the drive-thru line at Burger King is moving slowly today.
3. “Our customers and prospects are more enlightened than that. They’re not in those forums anyway.”
4. You can’t measure the ROI, and you won’t be able to for a long time.
5. Marketing didn’t create the Internet; engineers did. But the watchword for engineers on the Internet has always been “Stay anonymous,” so they’ll never embrace the element of self-revelation essential to social media.

Why engineering companies WON’T be the last to get it

1. You don’t just post plain text on a Web page somewhere; developers are coming up with hot, hip, engaging tools around these platforms. Real engineers like to hack around in such tools, or at least try to game them.
2. Google gets it, and they are an engineering company.
3. No engineer likes to be left out forever. As long as one self-respecting engineer is posting to some company’s blog somewhere, eventually others will try it.
4. If you don’t engage with your customers and prospects, your competitors will. Engineering companies don’t have trouble seeing that.

So, if your job is to boost your engineering company’s online presence and customer engagement in these forums, maybe you should give the process a different name:

“Social Media Engineering”

Do you think this will resonate better with your engineers? “I need you to help with our social media engineering this month. Can you man the Twitter account and see what’s going on?”

Between Bing and Google, there are under 1,000 occurrences of this phrase, and nobody has the domain yet (although Linda Skrocki at Sun Microsystems has it in her job title).

Do you think this will fly, or is it just a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

photo credit: jurvetson

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Research published by Bredin Business Information suggests that, while you and your e-marketing squad are employing newer and fancier bits to start conversations, your SMB targets may in fact prefer to receive decidedly lower-tech (and higher-priced) touches from you in the form of newspaper and magazine articles and direct mail, including letters, postcards and catalogs.

Though many marketers are cutting back on offline tactics and making efforts to join the “buzz bandwagon” with social networking, the survey results indicate that “business owners are not nearly as enthusiastic about social networking as the marketers are,” said BBI CEO Stu Richards.

Don’t shoot me; I’m only the piano player.

What’s this have to do with hiring a writer? Not much, except that in marketing – as in writing – you ignore the preferences and interests of your target audience at your peril.

Don’t dismantle your e-marketing initiative. (Aren’t you glad I told you that?) Test it against your direct mail campaign. May the best conversation-starter win.

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