Today’s To Do List:

1. Design landing pages for email campaign
2. Implement paid search ads
3. Deploy transactional emails
4. Publish blog posts
5. Start drip campaigns
6. Optimize key pages
7. Plan sales promotions
8. Develop creative for display advertising
9. Post on Facebook fan page
10. Design merchandise up-sells

The to-do list of what you need to do to manage your online presence is virtually never-ending. You have so many tools in your toolbox, and you never feel like you have the adequate time and resources to be doing everything you really want to do. It is so easy to get buried in the day-to-day activities of managing your Internet operations.

However, as important as those tactics are to your success, you can’t forget to dedicate time to step back and take a 30,000 foot view of your business and consider your opportunities.

Real game changing ideas come by thinking big. That type of thinking can’t be crammed in between analyzing your conversion funnel and adding new products to your online store. You need to find the time to really allow your mind to clear itself of the day-to-day minutia so that you can think strategically.

This is not the once-a-year strategic planning that other groups in your organization may be able to do. Given the rapid pace of innovation in our space, you need to be doing this much more frequently – for example, monthly. You need to get out of your office, turn off your phone, leave your laptop in your bag and let your mind explore the possibilities.

What implications do Foursquare, Quora, QR codes, NFC, a double-dip recession, tablets, electronic wallets, cloud computing, smarthphones, federal spending cuts, Groupon, unrest in the Middle East, etc. have on your business? What’s the next big thing? What are your competitors doing? Where is the venture capital money going? What are the real visionaries talking about? Is there innovation in seemingly unrelated industries that you may be able to leverage? What do your customers really need, and is there a way to provide them with a better experience? What assumptions are you making that you need to challenge? What does all of this mean in terms of risks and opportunities?

Are you ready for your trip to 30,000 feet? Are you ready to see the forest through the trees?

‘Sorry’.  It’s such a simple word, but it can have such a tremendous  impact.  It can diffuse even the most tense of situations.  It can be a game changer.

By telling a customer that you are sorry when she has a negative experience with your product or service, you are showing her that you care, you sympathize with their situation, you aren’t blaming her, and you are willing to take responsibility.  Maybe most importantly, you can significantly change the tone of the conversation so that you can have a meaningful discussion in trying to find a resolution to her problem.  

However, ‘sorry’ is more than a word – it’s an attitude.  It’s a mindset.  It’s introspective.  It’s thinking first about what your company could have done to prevent the problem or what it can do now to resolve issue.

Elton John sang, ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word.’ Is that the situation for your organization?

I recently saw The Social Network, a movie about the founding of Facebook, and there is a line that has really resonated. Toward the end of a meeting between Sean Parker, Napster co-founder, and Mark Zuckerberg, Parker says something to the effect of:

You know what’s cooler than a million dollars? A billion dollars.

His point was to think big.  Redefine what success is.

Photo By Suzan Marie

That’s one of the common traits of successful entrepreneurs – they think big. They think in terms of ‘game-changers’, revolutionary ideas. They think outside of the box.

Not everyone can come-up with the next idea for Facebook, YouTube, or iPhone or how to send a human into outer space (and get him back), but we all can force ourselves to take a step back and think about how we can innovate in our jobs. Challenge ourselves to look at our opportunities and challenges in new ways. Question assumptions. Ensure that we aren’t just doing something because that is the way it has always been done. Learn from industries and businesses that don’t seem to have a direct relationship to ours. Always strive to improve.

Very few are going to have the success of a Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, or even Henry Ford, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from those types of successes to help us generate evolutionary, if not revolutionary, ideas.

We tend to love the status quo. The status quo can be as comforting and reassuring as a child’s blanket or favorite stuffed animal. Alternatively, change can be intimidating, nerve-racking, and uncertain. The danger, however, is that love for the status quo can lull us into a false sense of security and blind us to both risks and opportunities.

The pace of technology, business, and even life means that everything is changing at a more rapid pace. Entire business segments are both created and made obsolete more quickly than any other time in history. Competitors come from seemingly nowhere and opportunities can be taken advantage of in a way not experienced before.

Image: Tambako the Jaguar

As such, we can’t be hypnotized by the status quo. It’s so easy to continue to do the same thing and too often organizations create or permit cultures where people become more concerned with protecting their turf than growing the business.

You don’t have to look any farther than Blockbuster to find a company where the status quo was doing quite well but they neglected to recognize the winds of change. As a result (and the excellent execution of Netflix), the company is in serious trouble.

The best way to avoid the danger of the status quo is to create a culture were the norms are challenged, creative thinking is encouraged and risks and opportunities are continually being evaluated. Departments needs to coordinate and collaborate, and leaders need to be required to look not just at what’s right in front of them but also what could be coming further down the road.

You can’t be certain what change is coming, but you can be assured that some type of change will arrive.

How would you respond if you called a company’s customer service department and the agent told you to send an email to another customer service group and someone should be able to help you out?  Pretty frustrated, right?  Well, you see that type of response frequently by companies on their social networking sites.

It happens because sites like Facebook and Twitter are often under the domain of an organization’s marketing or public relations department and there isn’t sufficient coordination with the customer support group.  The problem is that your customers have and will increasingly turn to websites like Twitter or Facebook to air grievances and seek resolution.

Your customers don’t care which department is responsible for “social media oversight” or your organizational structure.  When they tweet you or post a comment on your Facebook page, they expect the same type of results (if not better and faster) as if they picked-up the phone and dialed your phone center (or emailed or contacted you via online chat).

Given the public nature of social websites, prompt and effective customer service on Facebook, Twitter and the like is extremely important.  Not only should you want to take care of your customer, but because your response is seen by prospects, other customers, vendors, and partners, it also impacts your brand.

Here are a few tips to help provide excellent customer support on social websites like Twitter and Facebook:

1. Understand that even if you don’t have a Twitter profile or Facebook fan page for your company, your customers will still voice complaints about your organization on those sites and you need to be prepared to react.
2. Develop a process to handle customer service issues that are communicated via sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Include all relevant groups within your organization and make sure that you treat the posted complaint like an email, phone call, or chat – in others words, be proactive in contacting the person who originated the issue and be ready to help them.
3. Have social monitoring in place so that you can respond quickly to issues.  If you are still developing your process, you can use social monitoring to get a sense of how many issues you might encounter on a daily or weekly basis.
4. Don’t forget that social media time (especially Twitter time) elapses at a much quicker pace.  Just like 1 human year equals 7 dog years, 1 real world hour equals something more like 7 twitter hours.  Responding in 48 hours isn’t seen as being prompt in the social media realm.
5. Be strategic about when you communicate publicly and privately.  Not all communication with the customer needs to happen via public comments.  The initial contact should be public so that others are seeing you are being responsive but often the follow-up (getting specifics, etc.) is better done via email, phone calls, or direct messaging.
6. Even though we live in a digital world, sometimes the best way to diffuse a situation is by talking the disgruntled customer over the phone.  The extra effort can go a long way and is usually appreciated by the customer.
7. Make sure there is some process to provide a summary report of complaints and issues back through the organization. The best way to handle customer problems is to prevent them in the first place and complaints and reported issues should be valuable feedback to sales, marketing, engineering, research and development and product development.
8. Be transparent!  Don’t, and I mean never, try to diffuse a situation or defend your company through a response where you pretend or give the allusion that you are just another customer or unbiased community member.
9. Don’t think that only ‘big’ companies need to worry about customer support on the social media sites.  People use the web do research on all types of companies (big and small, national and local).
10. Obviously, don’t forget that anything you post publicly can be viewed by everyone.  Think about how your response will be perceived by others – don’t be dismissive or defensive.

Is there anything that I missed?  What suggestions do you have for companies to be successful in addressing customer service issues via websites Twitter and Facebook?

You’ll hear companies tout the number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers or email subscribers they have, but those numbers don’t mean much.  Sure, everything else being equal, you would rather have more fans than fewer.  What is really important, however, is how engaged those fans, followers, and subscribers are.

My wife has an address book that she has kept for as long as I can remember.  She has hundreds of names, but many of the people listed are ones whom we have lost touch with.  We don’t know what is going on in their lives and we wouldn’t be invited to a birthday party, wedding, or graduation party they hosted.  In fact, a large percentage of addresses and phone numbers probably aren’t valid anymore.  We certainly can’t count everyone listed in that book as a friend, even if their information is still current.

The same holds true with your online marketing lists.  People may have signed-up because of a contest, by mistake, or were once interested in your product.  The reality is a significant portion of many companies’ customer lists are disengaged.  It happens – people lose interest, move on.

So instead of focusing on how big your list is, focus on how many people you can really get engaged with your company, brand, service, or product.  That is the number that really matters.

Image: Danilo Rizzuti

Math was one of my favorite subjects in school and my undergraduate degree was in Finance with a minor in Accounting, so needless to say, I like numbers and data. That is one of the reasons why I enjoy immersing myself in tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics, which are great at capturing the ‘what’ – what happened on your website, what content was clicked-on in your email campaign, etc. As a marketer, however, the ‘why’ interests me a whole lot more than the ‘what’.

Most web analytics, email, search and social marketing reporting tools provide vast amounts of data, but those applications are really more of a means to an end. Knowing that my traffic increased, my email click-thru rate improved, or a Facebook fan page generated significant engagement is useful, but what is immensely more valuable to me is understanding why those things happened. Obviously, if you know the cause of your success, you are much more likely to be able to repeat it. The better you can understand your target audience, the better you can market to them.

Most reporting tools can’t tell you the ‘why’. Humans are still best at that task – turning lots of data into meaningful and actionable insights. The problem is that many companies either don’t have staff with the right type of experience to do it or the staff doesn’t have enough time.  Often, organizations don’t know the right questions to ask.  As a result, decisions aren’t fully informed and opportunity is lost.

If you haven’t yet, make 2010 the year that you dedicate the necessary resources to being able to answer the ‘why’.

Image: Francesco Marino

As we approach the end of the year and the close the of decade, a number of people and organizations are rolling-out retrospectives on 2009 and the last ten years. If you didn’t do it as part of your budget process (you definitely should have), now is a great time to conduct your own online marketing program ‘year in review’ by looking at what worked and what didn’t.  Remember, you ‘pull yourself out of trees’ so you can see the forest.  In other words, don’t just look at numbers but really give some thought about why some activities worked and why some didn’t.

In looking forward to 2010, consider questions such as the following:

• Have your business objectives changed?
• Have your customers changed – what they want, how they shop, who influences them, what they prioritize, etc.?
• What critical factors are influencing your business?  For example, the economy, social media, mobile, changing values, etc.

In answering those questions, make sure you talk to other departments – sales, customer service, product development, etc, looking at what your competitors are doing and looking at innovators outside of your industry.  Also, don’t forget to challenge current assumptions and policies.  It never fails to amaze me when I ask why something is done, how many people answer, ‘I don’t know.  We have always done it that way’.

Ultimately, every initiative you undertake and ever dollar you spend should be justifiable and correlate directly to a business and marketing objective.  You should be able to explain why you are focusing on one tactic versus another (i.e. alignment with business goals and expected return compared to alternatives).   If you can do that, your chances of having a successful 2010 are greatly improved.  If you can’t, don’t worry –  it’s not too late.

Image: Johanna Hobbs

In the digital world change is constant and there seems to be an unending supply of new buzzwords and the latest and greatest strategies and tactics.  For most executives whose primary role is not to scour through digital media trade publications, research, blogs, rss feeds and e-mail newsletters, the flow of new information can be overwhelming.  Often, executives respond to this by either ignoring it or dismissing much of it as fads and clutter distracting them from the primary functions of their business.  Frequently, this is reinforced by the fact that, when it comes to digital trends, they believe that more often than not their “I told you so” assessments have occurred far more often than their “we missed that boat” concessions.

But here is the problem: if an executive is wrong and she missed that enormous opportunity for her business, the “we missed that boat” realization rarely ever occurs.  The reality is that most missed opportunities go unnoticed while the “I told you so’s” almost never do.   This becomes even more valid in a tough economic climate when every dollar of spending is being scrutinized.

Even the most senior executives should make it their challenge to better understand the digital world.  The digital realm is outside the area of expertise for most senior executives in most businesses and they should not be afraid to say, “Explain it to me as if I were a child.”  Likewise, executives should not go into these discussions thinking “I doubt it, prove it to me.”  They need to be thinking “there may be an opportunity, how can I motivate my team to stretch and think creatively to exploit new opportunities.”  We’ve witnessed great ideas coming from the most unlikely sources when leadership kept its mind open to creative thinking.

When executives make time to be educated about digital (and truly listen) and take the time to convey the needs and goals of the business, opportunities can be uncovered through collaboration and creative thinking and great results can be achieved.

Likewise, it’s critical that executives have individuals who they can trust who will educate them and are familiar with digital strategies, tactics, trends, available research, industry benchmarks, competitive analysis, and methods for testing and surveying customer and prospects.  Just as important, however, executives need to feel as though their digital strategists will listen and understand the keys to their business, their goals, their strategies, and their customers and prospects.  If you are an executive or owner who is ultimately responsible for your digital strategy and you do not have this trusted resource, make this a priority or you may be missing significant opportunities to grow the profitability of your business.

Ultimately, you should choose which digital initiatives to pursue based on the merit of the business cases used to support them and evaluate them on the measurable results they produce.  But if you do not commit the time and energy to better understanding digital, then the true cost may be the significant opportunities you don’t even know you have missed.

Too often there is a discussion about which is the ‘best’ online marketing tactic or channel (e.g. Facebook vs. Twitter or social vs. email) as if we can only choose one.  As marketers, we need to focus on having conversations with our consumers how they want and where they want.  For some, that is still email and for others it might be Twitter, Facebook, or something entirely different.  The more places we can be providing relevant content and useful information, the more successful we will be.

We recently conducted a number of online surveys for one of our clients in order to get a better sense of the audience overlap among their Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and email newsletter subscribers. What we found was interesting:

• 40% of Twitter followers didn’t subscribe to the email newsletter and 60% weren’t Facebook fans
• 50% of Facebook fans didn’t subscribe to the email newsletter and only 5% were Twitter followers

While there is some overlap, our client is getting a much greater reach by embracing all three channels than if they were only using any single one.

So instead of focusing on the ‘or’ (e.g. is Twitter or Facebook better), think about the ‘and’ – how we can best use all of channels and tactics like Facebook AND Twitter AND email AND video AND ….