Three Lessons I Learned From Bad Direct Marketing

I recently received an interesting-shaped box in the mail from Yahoo, so I opened it up, wondering what could be inside.

What was inside sparked a couple of lessons about direct marketing and the problems all companies face.

1. You need to get your target's attention. The interesting-shaped mailer did that. So did a simpler mailer I received earlier in the week that looked like an X-ray print-out. I paid attention to them, in part because they were sent in the mail -- at a time when everyone gets flooded with email -- and in part because they were unusual.
2. You have to make sure that once you get their attention, that you have something meaningful to say. As Charlene Li, author of "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead" and the founder of the Altimeter Group (and former Forrester Research, writes, "organizations need to earnI the right to have a conversation...without a relationship in place,the best marketing campaigns will fall on deaf ears." The gift from Yahoo included a purple Yahoo! flag and a brochure about why marketing with Yahoo can help my business. The X-ray was a mailer that said we could get great results from using that company for our direct mail creative. But here's the thing: I don't need more clutter on my desk and we don't handle direct mail campaigns for our clients. So both were nice tries but inefficient efforts. I don't even recall the name of the company that sent me the X-ray sheet.
   
3. You need to consider different approaches when trying to reach elusive targets. The fact that Yahoo used direct mail to get companies like mine to advertise online doesn't mean that Yahoo doesn't trust its online marketing to reach potential customers. But it does validate the need to find different ways to reach targets. This time didn't work for Yahoo, but I don't mean to pick on them; I've received ineffective direct mail from Google, too. The difference is that Google didn't spend as much money on its piece, but they did send me many more pieces.

Do you know anyone who might want a used purple flag?

Metrics from Online Sharing -- the numbers are not high, which is both good and bad news

If you've got a blog or a Twitter feed, or you're an online marketer (including PR), you want to drive traffic to your site, Twitter feed, etc.

And if you're an online marketer, and your client or boss is reluctant, one of the things you need to do is defend the ROI of social media.

And that has not been easy to do.

As I've discussed, each organization brings different skill sets, goals, experience and connections with their target audiences -- so the metrics that matter may be vastly different. My metrics may not be relevant to yours, unlike circulation figures for print magazines, which is an apple-to-apple comparison.

In "Share the Moment and Spread the Wealth: The Big Business of Driving Traffic Back to a Web Site," the New York Times' Brad Stone goes beyond an introductory article on the topic. (The paper of record finds itself often covering the basics so that it can then write deeper articles.)

Stone gets someone to provide hard metrics.

Ok, so Justin.TV disclosed that visitors to its site now share links from the site 6,000 times a day (up from 2,000 per day), now that it uses Meebo. That 200-percent increase translates into 68 percent growth in traffic to the Justin.TV site -- a big drop off, but a much, much better return than direct mail's typical 1-percent response rate.

What's interesting is that the CEO ShareThis reported hard numbers for retweeting. ShareThis provides sharing tools to major sites like FoxNews.com and ESPN.com. According to the Times,

When readers post a link from a ShareThis site onto Twitter, their followers often “retweet” the link to their own Twitter groupies. As a result, 18 Twitter users, on average, click on that link and visit the site. A single link to a story posted on LinkedIn, the professional social network, generates around eight visitors; Digg gets five clicks for every link posted to the site," ShareThis reported.

So, the good news: above are some metrics with which to compare your efforts. You may not be doing as badly as you thought.

The bad news: That's a lot of effort to generated 18 click-throughs, and that's for content from some very professional sites. And perhaps those 18 new visitors can help boost page view and stickiness metrics to tout to advertisers, but it still seems like a long way to go before that gets monetized.

New Survey Finds that "Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking"

Effective targeted or customized advertising has been the holy grail for online advertising, but a new study shows that consumers aren't so thrilled.

I'm not surprised. Actually, I'm more surprised someone had to conduct a study to find that out.

I'm also not surprised that of adults, there's one group that consistently responded that they're interested in getting targeted ads, discounts and news. That group: 18-24 year-olds.

So who doesn't like targeted advertising? Respondents 35 and older, who have the old-fashioned perspective of wanting to protect their privacy more. (Click here for a few charts.)

I find it mildly interesting that, 1,000 people were willing to answer questions about their preferences regarding advertising -- especially since two-thirds of them were concerned about their privacy.

What's more interesting, and potentially more troubling for online marketers, is that 69 percent of respondents said they would favor a law that would give people the right to know how much information a web site has about them.

On the other hand, as they become adults, teens may feel the same way 18-24 year-olds feel, and in a few years, the Times could report that most people like targeted ads.

Is PR Evolving? Can it? What Will it Look Like?

The media landscape is clearing changing. Print newspapers, some in existence more than 150 years, are either closing or shedding their print operations and shifting to online-only.

There are significant implications for journalists and J-schools.

But also for PR agencies and communications functions. We still need to work with print outlets.

But is PR evolving to address the new media reality? I suspect many are not fully embracing the future, based anecdotal evidence (potential clients are all interested in social media, but view it as a nice-to-do, not a must-do).

The question we ask over here is: what does PR look like in three years, and what steps must we take to ensure we're moving ourselves and our clients in the right direction. (We got some validation recently when a client, who had rejected our recommendation two years ago to embrace social media, finally did so, and thanked us for pushing them in that direction.)

What happens to digital agencies that have claimed bloggers and social media but have not worked with traditional soon-to-be online-only media? What happens to traditional agencies that have not focused much on social media? And what happens to internal PR functions and how they allocate resources?

A colleague heard a client say that PR is a dead field. I disagree, though I do think there will be a lot of agencies who can't make the transition from silent flicks to the talkies, to use an analogy current about 80 years ago.

I don't believe that social media is only a customer service channel, and therefore you no longer need PR.

To succeed, functions and agencies alike will need to think about how they can facilitate communications and generate meaningful results and benchmarks.

For a look at how science journalism and PR is evolving, check out this article on the blog, Flack's Revenge.

Developing Meaningful Metrics for Social Media

One of the main challenges for social media is developing meaningful metrics for success -- an important issue for Chief Marketing Officers and the finance chiefs who pay for these initiatives.

An interesting article in the Wall St. Journal, "Modeling Tools Stretch Ad Dollars: Chrysler Uses Digital-Response Data to Adjust Commercials, Drive Web Visits," outlines the steps Chrysler took and some lessons learned by Chrysler and its interactive agency, Organic, learned.

Here are some highlights:

• Chrysler and Organic experimented with different elements to not only drive traffic, but to boost sales.
• Planning started six months before the launch.
• They found that 70 to 80% of shoppers researched cars on the web before making purchases.
• Chrysler considered its campaign as an ongoing experiment. One tweak included tripling the amount of time that the URL appeared during the TV spot from two to six seconds. Chrysler also tweaked the homepage of its Ram Challenge Web site.
• A lot of the changes were made real-time, as metrics came in.
• Interestingly, Organic started including broader sets of data, ranging from sales data related to advertising in traditional media like print and TV to economic factors that affect car sales, such as housing starts, fuel prices and unemployment rates.