As It Ought To Be

I was excited to find this wordpress- As It Ought To Be- which lends credibility and substance to the idea of blogging. On the site, a group of varied professionals, intellectuals and artists, post heartfelt and thoughtful content about subjects they’ve devoted their careers and lives to.

This is one of the best uses of a blog. Real content and not self-interested, self-promotional prattle. With topics ranging from immigration reform to critical theory and poetry- there is something for every kind of thinker on the site.

• Interesting Note- The name of the blog is taken from the Thomas Paine quote below.

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.

Peer-to-Peer Mail

Software provider Centage addresses a letter to financial executives from its own chief financial officer

When mailing to a business audience, it’s always a challenge to get a package through the mail room, passed the administrative gatekeeper and into the right person’s hands.

Yet, getting into the decision maker’s hands is only half the battle. Once the busy executive has your message in hand, your mailing needs to immediately resonate with her or it goes straight into the recycling bin.

In its April mailing advertising Budget Maestro software, a financial management tool, Centage vied for credibility and relevance by tailoring its message specifically to its audience of financial managers.

The package arrives in an 11″ x 17″ kraft envelope with only a plain business address label. Enclosed are a one-page letter and a four-page, 8-1/2″ x 11″ glossy brochure. There is no reply device in the mailing, because the call to action directs prospects to call an 800 number or go online to find out more about the product and sign up for a 30-day trial or webinar (Archive code #836-699110-0907).

To establish credibility and relevance, the letter opens with a personal touch: “Dear Britt, Everyday senior financial executives like you, are analyzing their financial results … You’ve got to keep a tight handle on expenses and cash flow.” This “you-oriented” copy shows the prospect how Centage understands her professional role and how it can help meet her needs.

Another strength of the letter is that it’s written from Centage’s chief financial officer, John Orlando. Holly Intravia, director of marketing for the Natick, Mass.-based software provider, says that in the past she’s tried sending letters from the director of sales, but using the CFO as the signer adds a lot more credibility to the letter. There is also a paragraph about how Orlando was personally involved in developing the software to ensure it meets a CFO’s needs. “It adds some validity that our own CFO was involved in the product and is interested in sharing and educating prospective CFOs about the solution,” Intravia says.

In addition to the letter, a four-page, colorful brochure also addresses the financial executive’s needs head-on. “The brochure gives me an opportunity to convey more salient information in a different way than just a text-on-a-white-background letter,” Intravia shares. Budget Maestro’s benefits are clearly outlined throughout the brochure, along with snapshots of the software’s dashboard and reporting, to give prospects an image of what they can expect from the product. The copy, much like the letter, highlights how the product can help “you”—a financial officer—meet your goals.

There are bold, graphic calls to action throughout the brochure, and prospects have a choice of four responses: visit a landing page for a free 30-day product trial, visit a second landing page for a free webinar, call an 800 number or visit Centage’s homepage. The various calls to action help Centage determine where the prospect is in the buying cycle. “CFOs or controllers or VPs of finance don’t usually take that much time out of their day unless there’s some real interest in evaluating solutions,” Intravia says. For example, if a prospect signs up for a 45-minute webinar or a product test drive, he may be further along the buying path than someone who simply calls or visits the homepage.

When a prospect responds to the direct mail piece, the information is integrated into Centage’s CRM system, and a sales representative follows up with him. The company uses a tracking code and customer-provided data to attribute online responses to the direct mail campaign and to more accurately calculate ROI for the mailing. Intravia also says she does some email marketing to nurture those leads who come in through the mail and get them to sign up for a webinar.

Doing the work of a lift note, a Q-and-A on the back of the brochure, titled “5 Questions All CFOs Want Answered,” allays prospects’ doubts about the product. “You’re trying to anticipate their thinking, ‘OK, this sounds great, but how much time is it going to take? How much is it going to cost?’ … They’re reading the brochure and formulating these questions in the background, so now you’ve anticipated their questions and tried to put some answers to them,” Intravia comments.

Centage has been mailing a variation of this package for a few years, having also tested a postcard, a 6″ x 9″ self-mailer and a one-page letter with a 8-1/2″ x 11″ insert. This year’s mailing will determine how the larger, four-page 11″ x 17″ brochure will perform against last year’s smaller insert. Along with monthly direct mail drops from April through September, the company also advertises online and engages in email and telemarketing campaigns.

While it is too soon to calculate this year’s results, Intravia says the campaign is on track to perform as well as it did last year. She shares that past direct mail campaigns have brought in as much as a 300 percent total return on investment in revenue. “It’s much more than a breakeven,” Intravia notes.

Intravia plans to use her direct mail marketing’s healthy ROI to test more vertical messaging in next year’s mailings. Using design templates to produce variations on the mailing, she wants to address different industries’ needs with specific copy. “There’s certain industries where we’ve had a lot of success … I would want to test this package with very industry-specific messages. How our solution, the Budget Maestro product, can be tailored to help them budget for their particular industry needs,” she describes. The only challenge, she reveals, is finding new lists and further segmenting her lists to get enough volume and quality for a good return on a vertical mailing.

IDEA IN ACTION: Benefits of a One-Page Letter
You may be lucky enough to get your business mailing onto the decision maker’s desk, but you need more than luck to actually get your letter read. One tip to appeal to busy executives is to keep your sales letter short and sweet. “People are very busy these days, and there’s a lot of competition for their attention … So I think that a one-page letter, getting to the point as soon as possible, with the language that resonates with their daily challenges is sufficient to motivate them to take some action,” says Holly Intravia, director of marketing for Centage. “If you’ve got something attractive, interesting and engaging, and your message is right on, that’ll motivate the prospect to call you or go online to your website,” she adds.

(Originally published in October issue of Inside Direct Mail.)

Disney’s Self-Mailer Rolls Out Value

Disneyland puts its summer resort offer in lights in a deluxe self-mailer

Direct mailers who love self-mailers love them because they’re produced quickly and cost effectively, eliminate the problem of getting the envelope opened, and can really support a lot of creative that wouldn’t normally fit into a typical direct mail package.

In selling its resort offerings, Disney and its Disneyland resort have found self-mailers work best. “Being in direct marketing, we all know about #10 as one of the tried-and-true communication vehicles for direct response, but we … don’t use #10s and we pretty much just use self-mailers in terms of efficiencies in cost and speed to market,” says Patricia Rodriguez, CRM program manager II for Disney Destinations.

For its late summer Disneyland resort offer, Disney sent a deluxe self-mailer that folds out vertically into four panels on each side. The mailing dropped at the end of April, and along with an email component, it has been performing really well so far, bringing in more than 80 percent of the target sales the company wanted to achieve (with only 43 percent through the booking window).

When guests receive the mailing, they see teaser copy on one side, which reads, “See The Light — An amazing hotel offer and awesome entertainment make this summer sizzle at Disneyland.” Behind the copy, there are white lights and bright stars set against a night sky. On the address side, the “Save 35 percent” offer, travel dates and guest PIN number are all spelled out.

Once inside the mailing, the “See The Light” theme is carried out with an entire vertical, four-panel side of the mailing showcasing Disney’s Electrical Parade and fireworks show. Copy at the top reads, “See The Night In A Whole New Light!” and there are dragons, flames, bursts of fireworks and the iconic Disneyland castle lit up at night. The offer dates, discount and call to action (a toll-free number) are all repeated on the edges of the luminescent panel.

“That [panel] kind of served two purposes: One excites the children because it’s something that mom could share with the children, but also perhaps something that could be left as a leave behind … like a mini-poster for kids,” Rodriguez shares.

The remaining two sides of the panel show pictures of families enjoying the resort and reiterate the offer, call to action and benefits of vacationing with Disney. In addition to the toll-free number, guests also can visit a website to learn more about the offer, but they must book over the phone. An email communication that really pushed the offer, and featured similar creative, also was sent out around the same time as the direct mailing (Archive code #520-705739-0905).

Due to the down economy, Rodriguez says the traveler’s mailbox has become even more cluttered with competing resorts clamoring for bookings. In this crowded environment, Disney has decided to really push its offer. “We’ve definitely become more ‘retail-oriented,’ if you will, because we want to make sure it’s a hard-hitting sales message-that the guest understands what they’re getting and why it’s such a good deal and why it makes Disneyland, in this case, affordable for them to come [to] at this particular time,” she explains. Using the creative four-panel vertical self-mailer is another way the resort tried to break through the noise and clutter in the prospect’s mailbox.

Rodriguez uses data from past campaigns and proprietary targeting and segmentation to mine Disney’s internal and external lists for the best prospects. The prime guests are families with children, and Rodriguez says this and Disney’s other mailings tend to be geared toward moms in particular. “It’s the mom who goes through the mail … and is the decision maker, and she would be able to ‘sell’ the family on the vacation,” Rodriguez points out.

Disney sends several seasonal offers for its resorts throughout the year, and although this campaign did not include any tests, it regularly tests offers, creative, timing and channel, and does a full analysis of each campaign to come up with rich data to use in the next mailing. For next year, it might send or test this format again. “Potentially we could test this campaign against a simpler format if we did feel that this one paid out at the level that it needed to,” she says.

To determine plans for next year, Disney first must analyze the current campaign. “We’ll compare it to past campaigns, asking, ‘Did it perform as well as other campaigns did?’ ‘What’s the ROI on this versus maybe other direct mail formats that were simpler and less costly?’ and devise our strategy for next year,” Rodriguez reveals. One thing is certain, Disney will work hard to flourish in another competitive year of travel marketing. “We’re going to move into another year that’s going to be very similar to this year, in terms of vicious competition in the marketplace, so we’re always going to be ‘pushing the envelope’ without using an envelope,” Rodriguez laughs.

(Originally published in Inside Direct Mail, September 2009).

Social Media … Where’s the ROI?

Virtually every publisher is panning for gold in this modern-day “Wild West.” Here are 5 tips to help you find it.
Originally Published in Publishing Executive Magazine on Aug 1, 2009

The explosion in popularity of social media sites, from bookmarking to blogs and social networks, has arguably changed the online publishing game completely. “Just as 10 to 15 years ago, the Web changed the publishing industry … social [media] is creating the same kinds of changes today,” says Shiv Singh, vice president and global social media lead at Razorfish, a global interactive marketing company.

While many publishers have developed viable social media strategies, the majority of magazines still are in a state of experimentation when it comes to social media. “It’s like the ‘Wild West’ out there in terms of new products coming [out] and massive user consumption of things like Twitter,” notes Matt Milner, vice president of social networking for Hearst Magazines and founder of Answerology, a question and answer-based social platform that Hearst recently acquired.

It’s difficult for publishers to justify investing in social media when faced with an economic downturn, rising production and distribution costs, and decreases in print advertising pages. It’s also hard to quantify many of social media’s intangible benefits, such as two-way communication with readers, brand awareness and engagement, and market research. While there are measurable results of social media, including advertising revenue, increased site traffic and incoming links, these benefits are difficult to come by, and do not always produce enough return on investment (ROI) to offset the costs of building and maintaining a social media presence.

“If the economy hadn’t tanked … people would be happy to just sort of dance along, dabbling in [social media] for the next few years without worrying all that much about it, but because the economy did tank … people aren’t willing to put a lot of time or resources behind this effort, unless they’re confident that they’re going to get something back,” comments Adam Sherk, search/PR strategist for Define Search Strategies, an online audience development firm funded by the New York Times Co.

To shed some light on the challenges of implementing a profitable social media strategy, Publishing Executive talked with experts from around the publishing and social media spheres about their forays into social media, its benefits and where they’re finding ROI. Below is a round-up of five tenets for creating ROI-driven social media efforts.

1. Create Advertiser-Friendly Assets
One concrete source of ROI in social media is through site sponsorships and advertising placements. In integrating social media into a publication’s Web site or even creating a new social entity, publishers should not only consider their users’ needs, but also keep potential advertisers in mind. Hearst Magazines developed a social media strategy that combines peer-to-peer networking and a controlled, branded environment to successfully generate new advertising revenue.

When Hearst Magazines acquired Answerology, it built this technology into its existing publication sites. “What we’re doing is setting up different communities [around topics such as] … shelter, house and garden, food, beauty, style, relationships, areas where Hearst already has a consumer magazine, a big bunch of users and advertisers,” Milner says.

In addition to offering peer-to-peer communication, Hearst also incorporates expert voices on its Answerology sites, such as Seventeen.com/ask. For example, when a teenage girl asks a question about skin care on Seventeen’s site, she can receive answers from her peers, the magazine’s beauty editors, or even a paid sponsor such as Neutrogena (whose comments would be clearly labeled as being from a beauty expert at Neutrogena).

Milner says the expert advice adds value for the readers, increases the community’s credibility, and gives companies the chance to participate in the social media conversation and not just advertise along the margins of the Web page. “The ROI is going to come from the marketers’ saying … ‘We’re willing to pay for a branded environment, and we want engagement with the users,’” Milner states.

2. Allow for Highly Targeted Communities
In building a social media solution, one magazine does not necessarily equal one network. Within your readership, there are multiple subgroups or niches of interests, and it’s most beneficial to users and to your bottom line to allow for highly targeted networks to develop online.

John Byrne, editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com, had targeting in mind when developing BusinessExchange.com, a unique Web offering that combines social media and content aggregation. Although both are owned by McGraw-Hill, Business Exchange is a completely separate brand from BusinessWeek.

It allows registered users to create business topics, aggregate content from the Web on those topics, and comment and interact with like-minded community members. In addition to user-supplied content, the site automatically pulls content for each topic from all over the Web including blogs, news outlets and Twitter. With more than 1,500 topics, the communities are extremely targeted. For example, there are dozens of topics related to Apple computers and dozens related to sustainability.

The specific nature of the content is valuable to users, who can stay on top of their varied interests, and it is also highly valuable to advertisers, who are looking for target audiences. “If you were interested in reaching an audience that’s keenly interested in ‘green’ topics, we can literally sell you the 24 topics we have, from solar and wind energy to hybrid cars and biofuel,” Byrne shares.

In the business-to-business arena, developing niche communities is a natural fit. “I think that most b-to-b publishers have really engaged communities already on their Web sites, on their digital events, in their face-to-face events and around their traditional print products,” comments Stephen Wellman, director of community and content for Ziff Davis Enterprise, publisher of eWeek and other technology-focused publications.

Ziff Davis has developed two community-based Web properties, Developer Shed (DevShed.com) and SmarterTechnology.com, that attract paid advertisers and sponsors. Both sites aggregate content from several of Ziff Davis’ print and online products, offer highly specific areas of interest, feature fresh on-site social features like forums, blogs and comments, and integrate with outside social networks. Wellman adds that the properties and their integration with Facebook and LinkedIn have also increased ROI by raising awareness for the company’s online e-seminars and virtual tradeshows.

3. Court Search Engines
One of the advantages of building your own social media solution—versus just participating in outside networks such as Facebook—is improved search results. “The catch with social media marketing is that a lot of these sites put a ‘no follow’ attribute on links, and when the [search] engines see that, they don’t follow the link and they don’t pass any link value or SEO value through the link,” Sherk points out.

He says that while a presence on a network like Facebook, or numerous hits on a social bookmarking site like Delicious.com, will generate traffic in secondary links to your site, it will not increase your links with SEO value.

The thinking behind the no-follow attribute is that it will protect a network’s content from users who would manipulate it purely to boost their search results. As social media becomes more ingrained in all aspects of Web use, Sherk believes the engines and social networks might adjust their thinking. “More and more online activity and interaction is happening on social media sites. So if you completely divorce that from your ranking algorithms, you’re missing an important signal as to what people value on the Web today. So I do think that over time, you’ll see it factored in more and more,” Sherk says.

Building solutions like McGraw-Hill’s Business Exchange and Hearst’s Answerology is advantageous because their content, including links, can be optimized for search engines. “We built from scratch, and we built in an era when everyone acknowledges that search is the end-all and be-all way to locate information,” Byrne states.

He says that while there are only 1,500 topics on Business Exchange, more than 2 million of its pages are indexed by Google. “Google is even indexing individual actions by members of the Business Exchange community, so if you commented on a piece, a story or a blog post within the product, it’s going to get indexed, and, of course, your profile’s going to get indexed as well,” says Byrne, whose Business Exchange profile is ranked higher in search results than his Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.

Milner is working on a SEO and SEM analysis, but says the Answerology sections of the Hearst sites index well.

4. Use the Analytics and Metrics Available
Many online experts laud engagement as the new metric for social media, but there is not yet an effective, standard way to measure engagement. “We’re really pushing for engagement, and we’re trying to find new metrics to do that … but I think that’s going to take the industry some time,” says Domenic Venuto, senior vice president and head of media and entertainment for Razorfish.

“There are a lot of things that can be measured right now, some that are more worthwhile than others, but I think that it’s very fair to say industry wide that people are still just getting their arms around [social media],” Sherk says.

As marketers and publishers fine-tune social media and engagement metrics, publishers must use available tools to gauge performance. For example, Wellman suggests using statistics such as the size of groups on social media platforms; the number of comments on articles; time spent on the site; number of page views; number and direction of links; and other on-site activity, such as the amount of discussion between users to generate a rough engagement metric.

Using these measures, he says, publishers can deliver a clear metric and demonstrate growth in those areas over time.

Milner says that the number of conversations with consumers an advertiser can engage in over a set period of time is an example of an engagement metric within Hearst’s platform. He believes marketers will more likely want to spend on a definite number of engagements with their target market on a site like Answerology, before paying a cost-per-thousand (CPM) for advertising on networks like Facebook, where their users are interacting with each other and not with the advertisers’ brands.

5. Partner Up and Integrate
Both publishers and social networks alike are looking to increase social media’s profitability, and there is great potential in creative partnerships and content integration between companies. While many publications have integrated social media into their offerings, Businessweek is one of the first publishers to create multi-tiered partnerships with both LinkedIn and Twitter that add value and increase revenue potential for both sites.

“LinkedIn is the No. 1 worldwide professional network, and we’re all about serving global business professionals, so they’ve become a very natural partner for us,” Byrne comments.

BusinessWeek’s partnership with LinkedIn originated on BusinessWeek.com, where, if an article mentions Microsoft and several of its employees, for example, readers can click on a LinkedIn Connections widget under “Story Tools,” which opens a window highlighting the LinkedIn profiles of those Microsoft employees mentioned in the story. This allows readers to see how they are connected to the people mentioned in the article and potentially contact them.

LinkedIn also populates its company pages with links titled “more information,” sending users to BusinessWeek’s database of financial and personal data on private and public companies.

On Business Exchange, a button allows users to import a LinkedIn profile onto Business Exchange in seconds. This feature aims to increase registration for both sites and bring those coveted LinkedIn users who are early adopters of new technology onto the Business Exchange platform.

“Having more registered users … grows your database, and offers publishers the opportunity to interact with new audiences that they’ve never had before,” Wellman notes.

Finally, Business Exchange’s comment system is creatively integrated with Twitter. “We all know Twitter is really hot, and we decided that it would be helpful and a smart move to be the first major traditional media brand to fully integrate a major product with Twitter,” Byrne shares.

When a user comments on an article, blog post or any other content, that comment resides on the Business Exchange site, but it also automatically populates into the user’s Twitter stream. This increases traffic and visibility for Business Exchange and saves the user the time of making a separate tweet about an interesting article or blog post.

A Twitter module also exists on every topic page of Business Exchange, which searches Twitter in real-time and populates with any tweets on that particular topic. This use of Twitter ties into the site’s focus on combining social media and content aggregation.

These are just five ways that publishers can monetize social media, among a myriad of other potential ROI-generating opportunities. Like any marketing initiative, it’s important to stay apprised of new developments and to test a variety of social media solutions. No single answer or strategy will make or break digital publishers in the age of social media.

“There’s a search for a so-called magic bullet in traditional publishing, a belief that there is a magic bullet where there isn’t one. There is no one business model that’s going to solve the inherent problems that most print publishers have; you’re going to need a machine gun loaded with bullets, and you’re going to have to fire all of them to get the job done,” Byrne says.

New Software for Measuring Reader Engagement Online

In researching and writing about  magazine publishers’ online strategies – I have found that metrics like page views and traffic are being overshadowed in favor of reader engagement. Publishers and their advertisers are cultivating  loyal, interested audiences rather than a ton of disinterested traffic.

The only downside is, there’s no set of standards or tools for measuring engagement yet.  A page view is a page view- but how do you know if a reader is truly ‘engaged’ with your content?

That’s why this article on Nieman Journalism Lab’s site caught my eye. It’s written about a new piece of software called Tracer, which measures reader engagement by how often readers copy and paste text from articles and content. Publishers can use Tracer’s analytics to follow any re-use and reiteration of their content wherever their readers are cutting and pasting it (in blogs, emails, gchat away messages…).

Tracer’s set of analytics tools is a good way to start building a comprehensive engagement metric. I think cutting and pasting text is only a piece of the engagement puzzle but a step in the right direction and a necessary application for publishers.

To read more about Tracer, check out the article here.