Sunday, 03/14/2010 2:15PM – 3:15PM , Room 159

The New England Food Show | Boston Convention & Exhibition Center – Boston, MA

For busy restaurateurs, mid-level and senior marketing professionals and HR managers, keeping up with the rapid pace of social media can be daunting. With new social media websites, blogs, video sharing sites and applications appearing almost weekly, new opportunities are always on the horizon. In this workshop, you will learn how to plan, execute and measure a successful social media campaign and how to create policies to protect your brand and avoid legal trouble!

Learn how to:

• prepare and implement internal policies to protect your brand and reputation
• plan an effective strategy
• use analytics and other tools to measure success
• use custom Facebook applications to maximize social media return on investment
• integrate email and print to improve customer experience and increase profits
• create a community of fans and friends
• share photos, videos, notes, news
• publicize events
• support causes
• create polls and surveys to get valuable customer feedback
• paid advertising opportunities
• run promotions and contests

For more information or to register online visit NEFSexposcom

Thursday, 04/1/2010 7:00PM

Flint Memorial Library | North Reading, MA

Presented by: Dan Green, President, The Green Internet Group

For entrepreneurs, mid-level and senior marketing professionals and HR managers.

Over 18 months ago marketing budgets were slashed by  business owners and corporate executives looking to conserve cash during the recent economic downturn. As confidence returns businesses are reinvesting in marketing . However 18 months is a long time and much as changed. Despite the hype and proliferation of self -proclaimed “social media marketing experts” few businesses have truly harnesses the power of social media. Worse, many have spent significant resources with little or no return on investment in social media.

Find out what works, what doesn’t and how measure results so you can decide whether investing in social media is right for your business.

Learn how to:

• prepare and implement internal policies to protect your brand and reputation
• plan an effective strategy
• use analytics and other tools to measure success
• use custom Facebook applications to maximize social media return on investment
• integrate email and print to improve customer experience and increase profits
• create a community of fans and friends
• share photos, videos, notes, news
• publicize events
• support causes
• create polls and surveys to get valuable customer feedback
• paid advertising opportunities
• run promotions and contests

For more information call 866.506.1923

A convincing argument that social media has evolved from passing fad to seismic shift in online communications.

The world has gone wireless, and new media marketing has taken on a life of its own. But what does it mean to SMS text, tweet, friend, or become a fan?

In this seminar, we’ll explore how:

• Social media has impacted marketing strategies and mobile exposure.
• Brand interaction, lead generation, and coupons through SMS texting can maximize your message.
• Social networking through sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter can build new business and grow your presence in the online community.

New media marketing has changed the way businesses and consumers communicate and interact. This seminar will show you how to get connected.

Please note this seminar is recognized by the American Culinary Federation. Chefs who attend this seminar will earn two continuing education hours.

Date and Time:
October 14, 2009
1 pm – 3 pm

Location:
CaptureCode
1000 Winter Street, Suite 4000
Waltham, MA 02151

Cost:
MRA Members: $55
Non-MRA
Members: $75

Who should attend:
Owners, Managers, and Assistant Managers

You can watch the entire video on YouTube by clicking here.

Another resume for a “Social Media Marketing Expert”  landed on my desk. Every month, I see several of these. But for some reason, this one grabbed my attention. I didn’t examine the curious sense of importance I subconsciously attached to this particular resume but I think I knew why–I’m looking for the moron who was Twittering at the movies the other night so I can waterboard him.

Okay, I can’t be sure he was Twittering. But despite 50 feet of Technicolor straight ahead of me, once the glare of his Blackberry seared my retina, this jerk became the focus of all my attention. Attempting to count his thumb strokes, I determined that his manic bursts never exceeded 140 characters. Aha! Must be Twitter. Besides, he reekked of self-involvement that seemed clearly at odds with his lack of self-consciousness. I bet those were his best sweatpants-nice choice.

Looking at the resume again, I decided to set up a phone appointment to see why the candidate so freely used the term “expert.” To me, that implies some track record of success and I wanted to find out more about how he defined a successful social media campaign. I suppose to protect his real world reputation we should give him a name. Let’s call him Earl. I made the call.

After the introductions and diversionary pleasantries I began the interrogation. “So Earl, tell me about your most successful social media initiative”.“Well, what do you mean by success” he asked. “No, Earl, that’s the point” I said in a tone that masked my premature frustration. But I knew where this was going. “What do YOU mean by success?”

“For Company X, I used Twitter to talk about my client’s company. I watched for trends and made direct contacts with some who looked like good potential customers. We ended up with over 350 followers for this thread and got a lot of traffic to the company website. I also found blogs that looked like they might be read by prospective customers and I participated in those. I linked to some videos on YouTube, then …” With visions of water pouring over Earl’s hooded head I interrupted. I couldn’t take it anymore, not another one of these guys.

“Hold on a second Earl. I was at the movies the other night and swear I saw a guy a couple of rows in front of me doing pretty much the same thing. The clients I answer to might want some details. You know, pesky things like what was the total investment? How much incremental revenue was attributable to marketing ? What was the return on marketing ? What was the estimated value of media exposures achieved? What was the media exposure return on marketing investment and how was that calculated? Given current economic conditions, marketers are being held accountable for performance. How to you quantify success? ” I knew I was being tough. If only he hadn’t said he was an expert. Or if he owned up to being the guy in the theater.

There was a pause. I could hear him thinking Wow, that’s cool. I didn’t know you could measure that stuff. Finally Earl explained his concept of success. “I create buzz by starting conversations. I get people to my clients’ website without their having to buy media or pay for clicks. Social media is about transparency.”

“Excuse me Earl, but you did all this for free? And you represented yourself as a marketer for Company X”?

We talked for another minute or two and that was that. Earl never confessed to assaulting me with his Blackberry. Even if he was the guy in the theater, I don’t think he had the capacity to understand that he did anything wrong. After all, he was a social media marketer on the job. Maybe he is right. After all, the movie was Gran Torino with Clint Eastwood. I confess that had some degree of influence. But be advised. Social marketers without success metrics better stay off my lawn.

What’s your story? Can you tell a colorful story that paints, from a customer perspective, a vivid picture of what it’s like to do business with your company? Describe every interaction at each of your touch points. Before you can make the social web work for your business, be certain you and everyone in your company can tell the same story to every customer.

Your story may start with someone answering the phone. How many times does it ring? What does the person answering your phone to greet your customer say? Perhaps your typical customer experience starts with a physical visit to your store, office or practice. What does the customer see, smell, hear–what grabs his or her attention immediately. Be a fly on the wall and describe the conversation between the customer and the person representing your company. Let’s give him a name and job description. How about Beau? (Why not Beau–you have a problem with Beau?) Beau is a salesperson. He may have other duties but at this moment of truth, your first customer touch point, Beau is a member of your sales team–and your marketing department.

In a retail environment with a typically short sales cycle, examine every touch point all the way through checkout including where Beau warmly thanks the customer for coming in. If yours is a professional service business with a longer sales cycle, describe exactly how you want the customer to experience very step in your lead nurturing process.

Putting words to this experience will enable you to consistently communicate to each of your employees exactly what is critical for every customer to experience. This experience is what your customers are talking about. If the experience exceeds their expectations they will create buzz. If it falls short, they will quickly forget you or create the kind of buzz you’ve worked extremely hard to avoid.

You may not realize it but your customers are describing this experience–on social communities like Yelp, shopping portals like Amazon, Biz Rate and in increasing volumes on Facebook and Twitter.

If you are a traditional marketer you may find yourself quite uncomfortable with this concept. Traditional marketers are used to doing all the talking. From mass media to more direct methods such as direct mail, email or print advertising, traditional marketers set an expectation. If the creative is good, it also begins to tell a story–the story you want to believe is true. But it’s the customer’s experience that determines which story gets told. This is especially true online.

In large numbers customers are looking to online reviews before making any buying decisions. Their numbers increase daily, spurred by tough economic conditions where every dollar counts. Their stories are the ones that matter, because it’s the one that will be told to friends, family, and co-workers. Oh yeah, they’ll also probably tell tens of thousands of others by writing about it on their Facebook pages and other social networks. If their experience was memorable, good or bad, you can bet you’ll get “Tweeted” about on Twitter.

This is part of marketing today that makes traditional marketers so uncomfortable. The customers are in control. You don’t get to do all the talking anymore. So what should you do about this?

First, make sure the experience you describe when doing the suggested story telling exercise is one that can be told and lived by everyone who interacts with your customers. If you can’t tell it, you can’t expect an Oscar winning performance by your staff. The primary generator of negative buzz is failure to live up to expectations.

Next, take a tour of MySpace, Facebook, and other sites that allow customer feedback and reviews. Yahoo Local and Google Local are a good place to start. Try to locate your business and see if there’s a conversation online you didn’t know about. If you stumble upon a bad review resist the temptation to write your own review or address any conflicts online–not yet. If your business is not listed you’ve stumbled upon a huge opportunity. Get listed on critical local search engines and social community websites.

Get a feel for the culture and tone of each site. Learn the lingo, what generates interest, what’s okay and what isn’t. Keep the bit in your teeth and don’t say anything yet. Words have an extremely long online shelf life. On social networks it’s important to learn how to listen before you start talking. Trying to undo a rookie mistake can be a daunting and expensive task.

If you find enough people telling your story differently than you tell it, start by taking a fearless look at your operations, examine every touch point and get to work on the story-telling fluency of everyone at your company. Make sure the same story is told to every customer. Once you have accomplished that, you’re finally ready to engage the online social community.

Next time we’ll discuss how to get started participating in online communities, how to handle negative buzz and how to use tools like twitter to stay a step ahead of your competitors.

Microsoft’s Bing.com is out of beta and initial stats show interest was high and in alignment with Microsoft’s goal of becoming the number two search engine within five years.

Launched as a decision engine as opposed to a search engine, Bing’s initial focus is on travel, shopping, health, or local search. If the concept of being a decision engine translates to users, those of us in search marketing might discover a higher proportion of users are further down the purchase funnel, ready to buy. Bing has tremendous implications for pay-per-click advertisers as searches at this end of the funnel could lead to better conversion rates and require reallocating client keyword portfolios. Time and testing will tell. But for our clients in the travel and local search space we are considering diversifying their spend. If the early trends hold Yahoo will need to respond to survive.

Google added another twist to organic search with the launch of Google Squared. Google Squared creates a table of facts about searched topics. The results can be shared, saved, or reorganized. The results are still inconsistent  but if  integrated into everyday search it’s position at the top of the results page presents challenges as well as opportunity. Combined with Google Suggest and that personalized results are becoming more of a factor as Gmail users grab more email market share, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a diverse and integrated online strategy that is specific to your business.  Those relying on five year old generic SEO will be lost and have a difficult and expensive time returning to a useful level of visibility.

A little less publicized development but important  to bloggers (what isn’t) is Google’s new policy regarding the “no follow” attribute.  No follow was commonly used to prevent comment spam and also to sculpt page rank by keeping search engines from pages that were not relevant in traffic building efforts. We could sculpt the rank of our sites by re-focusing the link strength to other pages.  Here are the details from terrific post by Mike Levin and Mari Assefa on the 360i.com blog. This changes has a lot of people upset but it makes sense as the new policy puts the focus back more on quality content. It’s a welcome idea, in my “can it ever be humble enough” opinion.

Finally Google has given yet another terrific set of tools to those focused on local search. The Local Business Center unveiled new data that can help measure the marketing impact of local search. Along with click-throughs and impressions uses can now see the top search terms used to find you, how many times Driving Directions have been requested, and which zip codes the driving directions originated.

Spring cleaning is not  just for the garage, especially around my house.  This is a great time to pull out your search engine plan (you do have one right?) and throw out your old ideas and misconceptions.

Breaking old habits was easy enough, except for one of us, but the real difficulties came when trying to accurately measure carbon footprint impact and true energy savings from things such as telecommuting and buying local. First we went after the low hanging fruit, tackling the day to day operations starting with supplies.

We’ve eliminated paper use wherever possible through the use of electronic forms, electronic invoices billing and my favorite–eliminating unnecessary paperwork. The paper we are using is made from 100% recycled materials including:

» Printer paper

» Sticky notes

» Stationery

» Binders

» Presentation folders

For our ink jet printers we’re testing out refillable cartridges and printing double-sided whenever possible. Internal power consumption strategy has been fairly simple—if we’ not using it-we turn it off.

Comparing power consumption to pre-conservation times was eye-opening. We’ve enjoyed a fairly substantial reduction in energy used with relatively little inconvenience. Next we moved on to logistics.

Eliminating unnecessary road trips seemed a good place to start. Much of this came down to better planning. We’ve also increased telecommuting options, keeping face to face meetings to a minimum. I have mixed feelings about reducing face to face interaction–it’s hard to play practical jokes on people who aren’t around so you can enjoy the fruits of your efforts. Phone pranks are kids stuff-we gave those up in our mid-thirties. But the total miles and time saved have given a boost to productivity in certain areas and we’re committed to the cause.

We haven’t cut back yet too much on client meetings but this area of our business was always fairly efficient. Because we work with clients nationally we’ve become quite adept at web conferencing and other virtual communication. The biggest challenge for many of us has been driving more slowly. This is proving to be a tough a bit to break. It’s a combination of time management, allowing a little extra travel time, and concentration. While finding slower drivers with whom we can pace ourselves is becoming easier, we’re still a small minority of drivers.

Changing product output was a bit more challenging. Some clients love the idea of using Forestry Stewardship Council papers for direct mail and print work. Internally we do what we can. But different papers inks and delivery methods all have an effect on margins, either through cost of goods, labor and service times. We’re examining P&L activity regularly to make sure our bottom line sustains our business philosophy.

Buying local has always been on of our core beliefs. But drilling down into the actual carbon footprint data is not only difficult but error prone. The results of these calculations are only as good as the assumptions built into them. The good feeling of supporting fellow local businesspeople can blind one from some unpleasant realities. Looking through the narrow lens of reducing environmental impact requires some dispassionate thought. Supply chains are complex and some real in-depth calculations have shown some disappointing results. Sometimes the local purchase comes with a jumbo carbon footprint compared to alternatives. For now we’re trying to really understand the complexities of these measurements willing to fall short in on our green initiatives if they come at the expense greatly reduced local business support.

We’re also looking at other potential energy consumption trade-offs resulting from telecommuting. When we all come to work we heat one office while lowering thermostats and turning off electronics in six different homes while we’re all at work. When we’re all working from home does the energy consumption from the additional heating and energy hungry devices we all need wreak more havoc than the gas we’d use coming into the office?

We’ll keep you updated on our findings as we dig into the data a bit more deeply. So we’re looking for any experience or input to help us make the Green Internet Group greener. We’d love to hear from you.

In some instances profit isn’t the only metric that matters; sometimes it isn’t even critical. It’s important to understand the specific goals for your campaign and the associated success metrics. On occasion we have clients whose only goal is to be at the top of the results. Position is all that matters. Your budget is going to based around achieving top position, profit be damned.

Other clients first begin stating they want to maximize sales and mention metrics like highest traffic, most conversions, return on ad spend and highest profit margins. While certainly an achievable and sometimes desirable strategy, none of the metrics factor in overall profit. Traffic doesn’t equal conversions and conversions don’t necessarily equate to profit. Return on ad spend is tricky for newcomers to understand, especially those who have been bombarded by salespeople pushing return on ad spend as ROI. But return on ad spend only factors in sales-not profits from those sales.

For many a good place to begin is a strategy based around highest profit or for those to whom it’s relevant, lifetime value of the customer. You can choose highest profit within a set budget of go for all the profitable sales available. Cash flow considerations and length of sales cycle can help with these determinations. Determining goals and understanding your customer acquisition costs and lead conversion rates will save a lot of money and give you a better understanding of how pay-per-click can be used in future campaigns.

To maximize profit you’ll need to determine some customer acquisition benchmarks:

» What a new client is worth;

» Your gross profit

» Lifetime value of a customer

» % of that you’re willing to reinvest in marketing to acquire more

Next you’ll want to set some targets based on website behavior.

» What % of visitors take the desired action-e-mail, phone call, submit lead form etc.?

» How many that take that action actually become clients?

Now you can begin to make an ROI estimate based on profitable sales.

For example:

» Your average sale is $200.

» A customer makes on average 2 purchases a year.

» Your gross profit is 65%.

» Your gross profit dollars are $390 ( $195 per transaction x 2 transactions a years)

» Of the $390 in profit you are willing to invest 35% to acquire a new customer.

With this information you can determine a starting maximum cost per click.

Your maximum acquisition cost is your profit multiplied by the percentage you are willing to invest to acquire another customer. Multiply that by your conversion rate (visitors to customer, not leads) and you have a good starting pint to determine your maximum cost per click, one that doesn’t eat away at the profit goals you set.

In this case:

Conversion rate (2%) X % of gross profit willing to reinvest (35%) gives you a maximum cost per click total of 2.73.

Next get traffic and cost estimates. The operative word is estimates, they are not predictions!

Let’s say that for the keywords you’ve selected you can expect to get 500 clicks in one month and you have determined your conversion rate is 2%. If you don’t know what your conversion rate is be conservative and use 1%-1.5% until you have gathered some historical data.

If you receive 500 clicks at a maximum cost per click of $2.73 with a conversion rate of 2% you will have acquired 10 new customers at a cost of $1365. With an annual profit of $390 per customer these 10 new customers will return an annual profit of $3900 from your month’s investment.

Here we were focused solely on how to factor actual profits into bid costs. I haven’t address things like ad copy, keyword selections, the effect of ad position on CPC and conversion rates, bid management or other nuances of successful paid search marketing campaign management. Remember that paid search can get people to knock on your door but your website or landing page has to convert them to clients.

Next time we’ll discuss how minor improvements in conversion rates can yield major increase in profit and how you can achieve them.