ErnieGray.com

About eight years ago,  I started to notice a bizarre phenomenon.  I was paid by people to make things look “professional,” yet I repeatedly noticed that consumers were suspicious or oblivious to much of the visual language that was established by the past century of professional ad design.  I looked around for some theorist to back me up on this trend, but I couldn’t.  I kept it to myself for fear of my customers thinking me heretical.

During the early to mid 2000′s, I had a gut instinct that my website would perform better if I kept it extremely simple and text-based, even though I was selling web design and marketing.

I was right.  Customers appreciated the direct message and the idea that I was accessible and — well —  imperfect.  The lack of gloss and glimmer made my often techno-phobic potential customers feel like they could trust me, or perhaps they could get a good deal.

Banner blindess is a real phenomenon that I’ve thought a lot about.  It is the culmination of widespread selective perception patterns where  we learn where ads are going to be placed on a layout, or how they differ visually from the regular content, and “tune them out.”

This is no surprise.  Human perception has evolved to distinguish the most minute differences in things, and as we log more hours online, the more we recognize subtle patterns of where an element came from.

The reaction to these analytic user trends is online advertising that has evolved into a hodge-podge of fake news articles, personal phone-self pics and anything that will fool us into thinking that somehow it isn’t mass advertising– that it’s a real person or group that is on the other side of that hyperlink.

The fundamental lesson goes way back to one of the truisms of the usability theory of Jacob Neilsen: we  hate it when we don’t have control over our interactive experience.  We’re engaged in an immersive experience where we are choosing the next step.  When we are forced to wait or lose control, we panic.  When we have to watch an ad that we didn’t choose, or see a slideshow that we can’t control, or sit through content we didn’t expect, it bothers us.

Even video streams have evolved to allow users to jump over a section by touching the timeline, we no longer have a tolerance for passive consumption in any form.

I think anyone who is online can relate to that, but it’s a problem that outlines a deeper shift in advertising that hasn’t been addressed enough in design or marketing theory.   How can advertisers make push marketing work again?

Well, banners are always going to be with us.  We’ve always been able to ignore billboards and newspaper ads, but perhaps this uncovers something that we missed along the way: that the deep cues of from whence something originates has more to do with it’s efficacy than it used to.

In other words, we are constantly engaged in a deeper and deeper test of authenticity.

What does that mean?  It means that when we get the feeling that we’re seeing a rehash of the same perfect commercial or magazine ad we’ve seen before, that once may have made our eyes water ten years ago, we now glaze over and get impatient.

This goes against everything that customers of advertising want: predictable outcomes that have worked for others using the established symbols of the industry.

So how do you explain that this doesn’t work anymore to a boardroom that is terrified of risk in this economy?  Chances are, you don’t.  You give them safe mediocrity and cash their checks.

Are the glossy feel-good production of pharmaceutical commercials and Madison Avenue magazine ads dead to us now?    The decision by many companies to shift their budgets away from TV ad time to more diverse interactive social marketing is testament that companies are reacting to this trend, even if they don’t understand why it is happneing.

We are highly suspicious of big anonymous corporations and the predictable symbols of comfort, safety and happiness they have bombarded us with since birth.  We know that guy in the photo is a model, or the woman in the commercial is an actor who probably never used the product.  We’re more cynical than ever — especially the younger generations.

The 20 somethings today are so engaged on a meta-level game of irony that many of the “hipsters” don’t know why something is ironic or from whence it originated.  They just have a gut feeling that authenticity is impossible, so they embrace the absurdity of postmodernism and pastiche.

Social media, the flattening of the planet and the growing ease in which your average person can create great content has transformed our expectations.  We crave authenticity or gut-busting humor.  We want something real.

Perhaps it is even to the point that interactive has conditioned people to be deaf or blind to what they sense is advertising.  Perhaps we learned to like commercials because we didn’t have a choice — we have to watch them so we might as well enjoy them in the greater context of this pleasant TV watching experience.  That’s probably why commercials have increasingly blurred into entertainment.

“Aha,” you may say — now you admit that social media is the wave of the future despite your previous denial!

No, that’s not what I mean at all.  For social media to transcend the efficacy and ROI of traditional advertising, it requires some serious work by seriously creative and witty marketers.  Authenticity is easy, but it’s incredibly difficult to manicure into something compelling.  Shifting your marketing to a social media team is a real leap of faith.  They better know what they’re doing and it better be appropriate for your business. If you are a company with a limited budget, it still makes more sense to buy signs.

We want you to be yourself, but if you’re not interesting, then we’d prefer someone else to be authentic on your behalf.

If something is good, it’s good.  The iPhone commercials are an example.  They showed us a product that blew our minds, but now we’ve seen it.  Been there, done that.

What seems to turn us off more than anything is when we sense that something is trying to be something it is not.  It is a nasty American habit: the desire to look richer than you really are, to buy a house and a car you can’t afford. Where this happens in marketing the most is on the small to medium business level, where a local business charades in the visual language of an anonymous multinational corporation,  but there are subtle cues that we pick up on that tell us that, “these guys are probably in a low-rent suite somewhere.”

Those cues are things humanist fonts, stock photos of beautiful models in big skyscrapers and words like “quality customer service.”   All these things aspiring business leaders salivate over, and aspiring designers deliver.

What would be much better instead is a good portrait of the proprietors, their story and testimonials and photos of real customers.

It’s a long way since we fast forwarded through commercials on the VHS tape.  We’ve discovered the “skip button” on our DVRs and on our websites and perhaps we’ve reached a point where we’ve truly internalized the skip button in our minds.  We feel that if we can’t skip over this section, it means that we must not have the right technology yet, or we’re operating on a sub-par channel.

We’ve carried our expectations of interactive control over to all parts of our lives.

 

Jumping off of bridges, wearing your pants below your underwear, investing in any stock with a .com in the name, credit default swaps, the atkins diet, asking people to follow their business on facebook out of nowhere — there are a lot of things that people do in great numbers because everyone else is doing it when it doesn’t really make any sense.

Over the holidays I saw a billboard on a major interstate that said LIKE <Business Name> ON FACEBOOK.

My wife and I had been making fun of this trend for a while and here’s a billboard on a busy stretch of I-40 that probably cost the advertiser 5-7k per month.  At that moment I realized that the mania had finally hit critical mass.  The blind are leading the blind on a mass exodus to oblivion.  Businesses are willing to shell out unlimited amounts of money on something that they clearly do not comprehend.

Now, there is nothing wrong with making it known that you have a presence on facebook, but when this type of inappropriate advertising gets this brash, it’s clear that a significant part of the population is following convention for convention’s sake.

What if I bought a billboard that said, “Tell your friends that you support our company.”  Of course,that statement is appropriate if the company is a big auto dealership and the billboard is on the way out of the showroom lot.  In that context, we can assume that:

• Most viewers know you
• They probably have formed an opinion or have been a patron
• Will refer you to others if they are advocates

But what if the business was a start-up or was trying to inform people of  their products or service for the first time, as was the case of this company who bought the offending billboard?  Generally, that is the POINT of advertising – to win new customers.  In that case, telling people to refer or support you before they know anything about you is not only awkward, but a huge waste of money on something like a billboard.  That’s why people who really GET social media think that such efforts are just plain backwards, yet because others are jumping off the bridge, everyone else seems to want to follow.

The simple fact is that most businesses don’t have a clue of how social media is supposed to fit into their marketing.  What’s worse is that there are a lot of “Social Media Marketers” out there who bought into a series of early myths about social media that were based on traditional marketing paradigms and elevated them to gospel.

Myth #1 – You Need A Social Media Campaign

Ok, I just wanted to get that out of the way.  There are people who say that if you don’t have social media strategy that somehow your going to wither away and die.  That’s complete nonsense.  This myth is propagated by the sales pitches of social media marketers.   On the contrary, if you don’t have the resources or the knowledge to substantially engage in the social sphere, it’s probably better that you don’t.  For some companies, social media isn’t really appropriate.  Your budget would be far better spent on traditional advertising.

Every day I see businesses cheapen their brands and annoy their customer base with idiotic crap by some clueless “social media” person randomly tapped from existing staff because they know how to turn on a computer, or by a social media marketer who thinks that noise is good.

“Boy, we sure have been busy polluting peoples newsfeeds with pointless comments that they now associate with your brand!  Look at all these posts we’ve done for you this week!”

This brings us to our next point:

Myth #2 – Get Involved In The Conversation

This one kills me.

What conversation?  What are you talking about?  Literally, what the hell are you talking about?  Who’s conversation? Which one?   The conversation about your brand, or the 500 billion conversations happening about 5 billion different subjects?  Who’s leading the conversation?  Is it you?  Who’s listening?  Your employees?

This is the real kicker — most companies are either posting pointless crap that their own staff “likes” and calling it a conversation or blathering on about the same self promotional marketing speak over and over.  It’s completely internal and totally useless, or it’s making your customers wish they had never clicked that button. You savvy social people know what I mean, really stupid daily posts like,

“Today is a great day to buy a car! Come see us at Randolph Toyota!”

Oh, wow!  I am so glad you reminded me of that!  Who cares that all my real friends are involved in a heated discussion about political unrest in Zuquebestan, I’m going to drop what I’m doing and go buy a car right now!

I always imagine sitting at the high school lunch table and having an intense discussion with friends about which was the best Zeppelin album, and some idiot you hardly know walking up out of nowhere, “hey guys, I got 25,000 on my video game last night!”

The table goes silent and everyone turns to the guy in disbelief.

This is a sure-fire way to make sure that you’re on your way to running what I call a “deaf campaign.”   I’ll talk more about that later.

Myth #3 – The More Friends/Followers The Better

I’ve heard marketers boast the number of followers they have.  Who cares?  What’s more important is how many of your audience is listening, discussing what you say and reposting.  It’s much more important to engage with true advocates of your brand, or decision makers in your sales pipeline than it is to focus on feathers in your cap.  More on that below.

The Five Sacred Truths Of Social Media Marketing

Truth #1 – Social Is The Fine Art Of Pull Marketing

Push marketing is the old way of letting people know about you – you buy a sign, a radio commercial, you send them direct mail.  They look at it and they may learn something about your business.  It’s as old as business itself and everyone understands it.  You shove your message in front of people.

Push marketing is easy.  Just about anyone can do it.  It works.

Pull marketing is much more refined. You have to create things that people want to find out more about.  You write an article or post a video that people may be interested in and share with others.  You educate others on things that are your specialty.  You create a contest where people can win something.  You actively pursue and nurture one-on-one relationships with advocates who in turn refer you to others.

What you don’t do is PUSH market in a pull channel.  In other words, you don’t talk about your stupid business sale every day and shamelessly self-promote yourself on Facebook.

Pull marketing takes talent.  It’s asymmetrical, it requires creativity and not everyone can do it in the same way that not everyone can write songs.

With pull marketing, people have to want what you have.  It’s like hiring a really funny comedian to stand in your store.  People come to hear the jokes, and buy stuff while they are there.

Truth #2 – Feed Access Is The Platinum Thread That Is Easily Broken

If there is one thing that is more important than ANY aspect of social media marketing, it is understanding that access to peoples news feed is the name of the game.  When people follow you, you are granted access to their private personal news feed and your updates will appear there.

This feed access is how you connect to them and add value to their lives by sharing information that is useful to them, or opportunities that will entertain or give them reason to share with others.

It is extremely easy to screw up and lose access to this sacred newsfeeed.  Most marketers botch it within the first week and don’t even know it.  This is the crux of where social media marketing goes horribly wrong.

Truth #3 - Most SM Marketers Are Running Deaf Campaigns

Imagine a man stepping out on stage, head held high.  He walks across the stage to a podium, and with an air of confidence looks out into an auditorium of hundreds of “followers.”  He thinks about how popular he is and smiles.

He begins to speak, going on and on about himself, what he thinks and what he’s doing.

In the audience, every single person (except perhaps his mother) is wearing headphones and is staring down at their phones, listening to music, chatting, watching movies and other personal activities.  Not one of them hears or sees a single thing the speaker says.

If there is one concept that most people don’t comprehend it’s that every Facebook user has the ability to privately reduce or completely turn off your updates in their newsfeed.  You are still their “friend” and they get to save face by maintaining that facade of “friendship” but you don’t have any real access to them unless you want to send a private message to them.

In other words, the main reason you were trying to attract followers is now moot.  I call this, a deaf campaign.

I’ve read various numbers, but the fact is that most business fan pages run deaf campaigns.  They attract followers but because of their inability to engage with their followers appropriately or add value to their lives, they stop listening within the first week.

This is why the number of followers you have is only useful to impress your clueless boss or competitor.

Social media marketing companies regularly fool their clients by engaging in contracts that focus on “number of updates per day or week.”  This is a sure-fire recipe for a deaf campaign.  If your only objective is to SPAM your audience, you can be sure they will stop listening, even if they were dumb enough to listen the first time.

Truth #4 –  Don’t Be A Populist, Focus On Advocates

Let’s face it, it’s nearly impossible to be interesting or relevant to everyone.  Unless you are a true commodity like a hamburger shop, you should expect that your customers and therefore your followers consist of a niche group.  It’s much more important to attract followers who are genuinely interested in a conversation about your industry trends than attempting to please a mass audience.

It is possible to engage a mass audience, however the tactics usually rely on free giveaways or pure entertainment that isn’t specific to what you do and creates a positive association with your brand.

By focusing on the advocates and decision makers in your market, you target the people who matter and maintain focus.

Truth #5 – Let’s Not Talk About Me, Let’s Talk About You

Anyone who knows how to work a room, pick up the opposite sex, or be an effective conversationalist knows that nobody likes a windbag.  On the contrary, people love to talk about themselves, or even better, hear someone else flatter them or give them positive feedback.

One of the cornerstones of many social media campaigns is the magic art of the REPOST.

The repost is when something you post is reposted by one of your followers to everyone in their personal friend network.  This happens sometimes organically when you post an article or amusing video that they share.

The best way to predictably leverage the power of the repost is to create original content that features YOUR followers.  When someone is featured in a photo of an event, mentioned in an article, or wins a contest of merit, you can be sure that they will repost it to their network.

A smart social media strategist will devise contests and create original content that regularly features his or her followers so that they may spread the love.  For this to be effective, it’s best to attach it to some sort of contest with photos or video.   A good example of this is a contest where people submit a funny image of their children, show off their home decor, or share images of their pets.  Each week, you feature a winner and put their submitted content on your website.  If each winner has 200 friends, then each week you are getting exposure to up to 200 folks who may not have heard of you before.

Congratulations, you are now a social marketing genius.  Go forth and spread the good news!

I was never much of an athlete. I recall an episode around 1982 where dad bought me a glove, took me out to toss the ball around in the big backyard where all the neighbors could see.  It didn’t go very well.

The glove was heavy for my diminutive frame and the ball ended up making more contact with my massive head, which to this day remains out of proportion to my wiry frame.  How can you miss it?

Donk! (Crying ensues).

After a season of coaching my first grade T-Ball team and soldiering through the leadership of the most uncoordinated youths in Sullivan county, Dad’s interest in my sporting career diminished and his passions moved on to other things, like fine raised paneling and early american architecture.

Around my father’s wood shop and personal spaces I would discover drawings and sketches between the pages of Southern Living, American Heritage or US News & World Report of things that he was going to build.   They were drawn on wrinkled, torn out sheets of blue and white graph paper that had the Eastman Chemical Company logo or “Safety First” in the top right margin.  I imagine him daydreaming at the office, sketching out blueprints of the 18th century style home he would steadily complete from 1985 to 1995.

One night when we were hanging out in the furnished basement with the puke green carpet and the cheap wood panelling, he sketched my portrait.  I had never seen him draw like that before and was transfixed by the way he used many strokes to find the right lines.  From that moment until I was about twelve years old, I was determined to be the best freehand artist in my class.  Through relentless practice, I was.

Even though Randy Gray wasn’t a coach in contests or feats of strength, he was a powerful coach in my life.  In fact, his own relationship with his High School football coach he fondly referred to as “Coach Owen” was instrumental in his development at 17 and 18, when he suffered permanent ACL damage that ended his promising college football career and tried to comprehend why his father’s body was riddled with terminal cancer of the spine in a Huntsville AL hospital.  My paternal grandfather, who died seven years before I was born, instilled in him a way of familial interaction that was both invasive and cathartic.

Again and again through my time with him, he would force me to talk about things that I didn’t want to talk about. And we’d have these talks about every two weeks. Sometimes these life coaching sessions would bring me to tears because I didn’t want to face the truths that were obvious from his more mature and objective perspective.   He wanted to know what I was thinking about both emotionally and logically because he had a deep need to understand the motivations of the people around him. A compulsive instinct for control became a doorway to explore and reflect on his own mind along with his son’s, and I think now that part of my karma in this life was to be with him on his journey of growth and to benefit from the wisdom he was uncovering.

Like his father, he died in late middle age at 56.   A young man by modern standards at the peak of his power and professional success.  My process of mourning his death is an ongoing one of understanding how much of my own mind is part of his legacy, and how I can honor that in my life work.

The roles that our mothers and fathers play in our minds is very deep and unique to each of us. The story of that generational relationship goes back infinitely, and most of us spend our entire lives coming to terms with and defining most of our relations in terms of those early ways of loving, nurturing and guidance.

Since times immemorial there have been social roles for a member of the tribe to be an objective listener and guide – to play the role of the father/mother figure for those who want to continue to grow beyond the nest.  The role was often called shaman, elder, priest or pastor.  It wasn’t until advanced stages of specialization that we started to see those roles amplified into professional paths such as psychology, psychoanalysis, clinical therapy and that sort of thing. These relationships were established through the channels of science and medicine that were popularized in the 20th century, and continue to have a staggering influence on the way our society deals with physical and emotional health.

In India, people have said that you can’t wave a dead dog in the air and not hit what is known as a “Guru”. The guru is ubiquitous because of Indias melting pot of religious methods.  They serve the rest of the population by creating a highly customized game or method that a person can engage in order to reach a higher state of enlightenment and awareness of their karma.

A million different paths to the same place with a million different guides.

This is unique to India in that it affords tremendous diversity compared to other cultures, and indeed becomes a matter of commerce. The idea that you hire a person to help you get better is a normal thing — you get a Guru. It’s been a big business serving people all over the world since the 1960s when the Beatles and Harvard Professor Richard Alpert imported it to our cultural palate.

The US and European world has dabbled with inventing their own modern capitalist functional equivalent through the self-help movement via labels such as consultant, teacher, guru and coach.

The trick of course is that you can’t be taught if you are not open to teaching. It’s like taking piano lessons, but instead of someone next to you to keep you focused on your technique and the sheet music on the stand, you want guidance on how to improve yourself to play the music you want to make.  Or as Aristotle would say, to help you on your teleological growth toward arete.

A friend, partner and client, Micheal Burt was inspired by the path established by western paternal luminaries such as Steven Covey and made it his life work to serve as an objective advisor to both individuals and organizations based on Covey’s foundational philosophy of life.

Known as “Coach” to the many who know him, Micheal is deeply disciplined in the idea that to truly serve those who are open to coaching, he has to embody the lessons that he teaches and consistently do the self-work that the people around him want to aspire to.

From an eastern perspective, this is both admirable and normal for someone to take on the role of the Guru as a service, because to be effective and acceptable at the job one must live a relatively selfless existence in terms of the idle pleasure and transgressive patterns that so many people cling to for meaning. For those unfortunate enough to get involved with a charlatan , well, we could just say that’s their karma.

When I first met Coach Burt a several years ago, he was at the dawn of his freelance reinvention and I was skeptical of anyone’s ability to take on that kind of responsibility without it becoming subject to his own insecurities. No doubt the power, fame and persuasion must be a sweet taste, but what I’ve witnessed in my relationship with him is a man who has made it his life work to serve other people in a way that makes them better, and perhaps to serve as the father to many in the way Covey was the ideal father he didn’t have.

If that is for his economic benefit, then good. That’s the way we do things in our democracy. The yogis of India, as part one of the longest running capitalist societies in history, have been doing it for millennia. The life of a travelling teacher and Machiavellian advisor is ultimately one of dedication and service, and with that responsibility comes both sacrifice and risk of the king’s sword at your throat of things go awry.

As an on-again off-again meditator for years, I’ve often suggested the ancient art of “sitting still and doing nothing” to my friends and associates.  The most common reply is that either they don’t know where to start, or have tried it and found it difficult or pointless.  Recent scientific research has laid to rest any objections that meditation is pointless: the psychological and physical benefits are well documented, and forms of meditation are clinically effective in treating depression, anxiety disorder, bulemia, ADHD and other psychosomatic speed bumps so many people struggle with in the modern world.

I recently discovered a gentleman named Job Kabat-Zinn who has had great success not only introducing meditation into the western medical arena, but in framing meditation practice in a way that is extremely easy to understand.  He is is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Zinn (his name sounding like “Zen” probably helped his career) calls his form of practice “Mindful Meditation” and when I heard his approach the first time I said, “That’s it — that’s the meditation format that your average American can grasp!”

Zinn cuts to the chase and doesn’t require any lotus position, pillows or any of that stuff: you can just sit upright in a chair or do it wherever you like.  As I often tell people, the traditions of meditation often obscure the simplicity of it for the modern person and make it seem silly.  Meditation is not praying to a god or a religious act.  It’s more like exercising or playing a musical instrument – it’s just a practice.

The primary method Zinn uses is focus on the breath, and does a wonderful job talking you through a proper understanding of how to practice a state of awareness without getting into mantras or other “kooky” stuff.

Below is a guided meditation session / talk Zinn gave on Google campus a few years ago.  The beginning is a discussion of meditation followed by a guided meditation.  For people getting started, I highly recommend using guided meditations by Zinn to help you understand the basic principles and to offer a little push in the right direction to do it.

I also have an mp3 of a simple guided mediation session available for friends who are interested.  Please email me for more info.

 

Email is one of the most attractive methods of modern marketing because of its low cost and relative ease of deployment.  However, for the average professional it is one of the least understood and potentially perilous ways of connecting with your customers.

Email blasts seem too good to be true.  Many times they are.  Like walking into a post office with a machine gun, they are virtually guaranteed to get you in hot water!

Email systems do not work like they used to.  In fact, the technology behind email traffic and spam filtering becomes more sophisticated every day.  Understanding how email works in 2011 is critical to success in email marketing.

Get To Know The Rules:

Email networks are smarter than you think
Unwanted email threatened to destroy the medium in the early 2000′s.  In order to save email itself, systems were designed to stop unwanted solicitation.  The email providers who did this best, such as Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, and AOL grabbed more market share.  Google, who sprinted ahead of the pack with Gmail did so because they offered the best Spam control available.

Today, just about all email systems utilize standardized SPAM protection.  Companies with in-house systems spend thousands licensing firewall and SPAM filtering services.

Multiple Emails At Once Are Always Suspicious
Let’s not get into the technical details of how ISPs detect spam, but the bottom line is that sending a single email to someone from one system is usually considered normal.  But when an address sends out the same email or many similar emails to many addresses, that immediately triggers flags.

Strike one.

Email providers cooperate
Let’s say you send out a big promotional email to 100 people in your “database.”  Those emails are going to many different systems around the country — to different recipient “post offices.”  Let’s say that some of these recipients decide they don’t like your message and mark it as spam.  Oh well, I guess your future emails will just get diverted to that users spam box.  No big deal, right?

Wrong.  Email SPAM prevention systems cooperate within their own networks and beyond, sharing SPAM data.  When you get voted down, it counts against you and sometimes, it’s much worse.

Strike Two

One Bad Apple…
Many company mail systems run their own private “post offices.”  These post offices live on one or more addresses called IP Addresses.  If you have an unscrupulous or uninformed user on your system who decides they want to jump into email marketing with a purchased list, they could quite easily get everyone at your company blacklisted across millions of participating systems.  This happens ALL THE TIME.

Strike Three: You’re OUT!

The Ignorant Stay Blissful
If your system is blacklisted, you don’t get a notice from any central authority.  You don’t get bounce backs or undeliverable request returns.  The other systems just delete your emails and ignore them.   People can go weeks, months or even years without realizing they are blacklisted.  Only when a single user sending personal mails from the same IP system notices their personal mails aren’t getting to their client inboxes do they start to make phone calls to their system admins.

Blasting Into Thin Air: The Dedicated MailBlast Server
One of the common tactics of companies who offer mail blasting systems is to place your company blasting service on it’s own dedicated address that is unique and separate from the company personal emails.  This is the perfect combination as it allows users to compose blasts all day long without getting the company primary mail system blacklisted.

So what does this mean?
It means that your email marketing is largely a pointless exercise.  You think that the emails are going out to hundreds or thousands of people, but only a handful of recipients on cheap or unfiltered systems are getting them.  Your system will not report this otherwise.

Mail marketing services who offer dedicated company CRM mail blasting do this on purpose, and by necessity.  They know that most of your users will abuse the IP and it will get blacklisted, so they make you pay for a dedicated IP that they know will soon be banished from the real email world.  They keep that “junk IP” away from the good ones and just let the folks who are uninformed or careless play in a virtual sandbox that goes nowhere.

Keeping It Clean
Staying on the good side of the SPAM police is hard.  Not only should you comply with CAN-SPAM rules, but you need to take the extra step to ask users to please unsubscribe using a simple link instead of sending to junkmail.  Not with an obscure link at the bottom, but at the very top of your message IN BOLD.

The legitimate mail marketing companies out there like Emma, Constant Contact or ListBox watch their users like a hawk, and analyze any addresses input into their system against the same SPAM blacklists that ISPs use.  I’ve seen purchased lists get pruned down by 80% by Constant Contact! They know that in order to stay in business and be effective, they have to police their users because they know their average customer is either uniformed of the nuances or would like to game the system as much as possible to their benefit!

The bottom line is that unless your users specifically requested to join your mail list, and continually have an easy way to opt-out, you could put your entire email campaign and anyone else operating from your post office in jeopardy.

After helping my family friend, Mr. Wayne Wolfe launch his new personal injury law website last year, he was kind enough to propose to his firm that I redesign and begin helping them with their new company website.

Wolfe, Jones, Wolfe, Hancock & Daniel, LLC represents clients in diverse areas of legal matters and have a reputation as one of the best law firms in Northern Alabama / Huntsville area, including:

Banking Law
Wolfe, Jones, Wolfe, Hancock & Daniel, LLC is regularly involved in commercial litigation concerning the issues of UCC law, secured transactions, lien priority, commercial paper, materialman’s liens, and related litigation.

Bankruptcy
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Lawrence looked Jenny straight in the eye and said, “One of the big advantages of using our company is that we perform Search Engine Optimization on our websites.”

“What is that?” Jenny asked.

“It’s a process of optimizing your website’s code so that it performs better on search and ranks higher,” says Lawrence.

“Oh that ‘s very important.  I need to be on the front page of Google,” Jenny replies.

“Normally we charge over a thousand dollars for this process, but I tell you what, I’ll throw it in for just $300 if you sign today.”

“Wow, that’s a great deal.  I really appreciate it.”

“Now keep in mind, that due to the nature of search, nobody can make guarantees on ranking, but this has helped other companies achieve first place ranking on Google,” says Lawrence with a smile.

—–

The above is an example of a highly melodramatic web development sale.  Closing techniques like those employed by “Lawrence” have been common since around 2002, and rely on jargon and technological ignorance to sell what amount to “vapor services -” services that have little or no significant scientific effect. read more…

The biggest challenge for businesses of all types these days is greater competition for dwindling market share. Unless you have a completely exclusive product or service that has an uncontested monopoly, you probably find yourself having to take less for what you sell.

As a friend said during lunch the other day, “people just aren’t opening their wallets.” read more…

Determining the value that people place on what you do or sell isn’t easy.  Setting a price that is too high helps your competition, yet setting your price too low leaves money on the table and possibly a LOT of money — a 5% increase in price can be huge in many businesses.  Recent research from Paul Hague & Matthew Harrison shows that many companies actually undervalue the products and services they sell. read more…

Email marketing is still king of the hill:  The USA’s Direct Marketing Association conducts an annual review of the ROI (Return on Investment) delivered by all forms of direct marketing. Email marketing is a consistent chart topper. For 2009, they predict an ROI for email of US$43.52. That’s over $43 returned for each dollar invested in email marketing.

Within those numbers are a lot of qualitative aspects, but it’s clear that the low cost of email marketing makes it a very smart investment for most businesses.

I like to classify or at least group social media in with email because they are very similar in form and function.  SM marketing usually amounts to your feed posts being consumed in the same way as emails.  Everything from becoming a fan (subscribing to the list), to reading a post (reading the email), to viewing less of or ignoring (opting out or marking as spam) is functionally equivalent.

Based on the email campaigns I’ve seen in the past decade or so, it’s safe to say that in a range of good (effective) to bad (useless and ignored) the majority of them are poorly executed and only achieve a fraction of their potential. Why? This article discusses how you can avoid rolling the dice and create a campaign that could become your most effective method of long term marketing. read more…