5 Marketing Technology stories you might have missed 3-31-12

Marketing Technology 5

Marketing Technology Stories you might have missed

MT5 Edition:  #31

Stories This Week: SEO basics, social ad spending is growing, Microsoft will lose desktop space to Apple & Google, improving email deliverability, interview with a uber-Marketing Technologist and boosting CTR through personalized offers.

1. 24 Ways To Make Life Hard For Your SEO Team

[SearchEngineLand] While the industry is maturing, SEO still remains a largely misunderstood discipline. There are three main reasons for this:

  1. The search engines keep the details of their ranking algorithms private.
  2. There is a lot of bad information and misperceptions presented as SEO wisdom online.
  3. The algorithms search engines use are frequently changing.

My Take: SEO is a marketing discipline unlike no other. It requires expertise and experience and it’s one of the few places where I avoid learning by trial and error. If you aren’t investing in SEO or aren’t getting the results you expect, partner with someone who lives and breathes SEO.

Change In Online Ad Spending

Change In Online Ad Spending

2. Marketers Accelerate Social Display Ad Spending

[eMarketer] Marketers, agencies to spend more display ad budget on social networks than with publishers this year.

My Take: I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t know what a demand-side platform is. Nor do I have the slightest idea where to find an Agency Trading desk at Ikea. However, it’s no surprise that Marketers are following the eyeballs and investing in social ad spending.

3. Windows PCs to decline as Android, Apple devices rise

[cNet] Windows will be eclipsed by Android in 2016, according to market researcher IDC. Expect Apple’s iOS to see an uptick too.

My Take: I’ve always viewed the world as Apple versus Microsoft, but as the device platforms change you really need to focus on manufacturers that have demonstrated strong mobile capabilities – enter Apple and Google.  For my money, Motorola is showing us the future of devices with their Altrix [link]

4. Six Tactics To Improve Email Deliverability

[MarketingSherpa] Read on for six tactics from two email deliverability experts. They cover tactics on reputation, testing, domain distribution reports, mediation and more.

My Take: Having spent years futzing with email deliverability, I know what a pain it is. I wish I had this article years ago! Throttling has always worked best for me in a B2B situation where the email volume is low.  My other tip is to work with your top recipient domains to get whitelisted in their spam filters. Doing so gives you a free pass through their filtering system.

5. Technology in Marketing, An Interview with Autodesk’s Jack Androvich

[ForresterBlog] Jack has made some revolutionary moves to empower Autodesk’s marketing through technology. Jack established a vision and built a framework for accomplishing his organizational goals.

My Take: Jack is an interesting guy. In addition to being a Marketing Technology visionary, he’s also very much into fine art photography. He’s got great stories and is a fantastic person to share a meal with.

[BONUS] Dynamic Email Marketing: How Savings.com boosted CTR 88% with offers chosen by data, not instinct

[MarketingSherpa] If you’re doing direct to consumer marketing, this case study shows you how you can get better response rates to your email/web campaigns. The bottom of the article has links to sample content Savings.com used.

My Take: I liked this quote on relevance:

Relevance: often sought, never attained

Relevance is a theory, not a location. You can’t “get there,” but you can run toward it. The team works to improve its algorithm to make better offers, but it will never be perfect.

5 Marketing Technology stories you might have missed 3-24-12

Marketing Technology 5

Marketing Technology Stories you might have missed

MT5 Edition:  #30

Stories This Week: Understand Pinterest legal stuff, use magic to create a mobile app, CLV, the new Facebook admin panel and Tweetdeck gets an upgrade.

1. The Copyright Question: How to Protect Yourself on Pinterest

[Mashable] This article digs a bit deeper to help brands understand Pinterest’s Terms of Service regarding copyrights. Pinterest doesn’t own your posts, but you do grant broad licence to Pinterest for the content you post.

My Take: I was pleased to learn that “Cold Brew Labs” owns and operates Pinterest, I like it even more now.

2. Make An iPhone, Android App Without Knowing A Line Of Code

[FastCompany] AppBuilder allows you to build an app for iPhone or Android in minutes. It builds a native app, not an HTML5 website. It also gets around the process of submitting an official app to the App store. This is Apps 2.0.

My Take: THIS. IS. AWESOME. I can’t wait to play with this more.  It looks better than Conduit Mobile which I was working with previously.

3. Customer Lifetime Value: one of the keys to measuring long-term ROI, among other uses.

[TheBrandBuilder] This is a great infographic that provides specifics on creating a Customer Lifetime Value score. CLV seems like  great way to establish a foundation for a segmentation strategy.

My Take: The models provided work well for retail business, I’d like to see some examples of CLV for B2B. If you have any please hit me up in the comments.

4. How to Use the New Facebook Page Admin Panel

[MashableBusiness] The article provides a good primer for getting started on the new admin panel.

5. Tweetdeck update has better list management, editing retweets

[Tweetdeck]

My Take: I’m excited for this update on Mac. Tweetdeck was unusable because it wasn’t refreshing. It earned the low rating in the App Store. So I’m hoping the new version, which I just installed, will actually function – I’m not even focused on the new features yet.

 

5 #SxSWi stories you might have missed

Marketing Technology 5

5 #SxSWi Stories you might have missed

MT5 Edition:  #29

Stories This Week: Homeless Hotspots, new technologies, soggy SxSW photos, no clear tech winners and a SxSW infographic.

1. Homeless Hotspots: Not a Terrible Idea

[Mashable] BBH turned homeless people into mobile hotspots. The optics of this tactic generated a fair bit of controversy.

My Take: I didn’t notice any of these homeless hotspots. Did I just not see them or do I tune out homeless people because I see them everyday in Boston? The controversy and debate are a healthy outcome.  Here’s an American Public Media interview with BBH on the matter.

2. As Crowd Swells, New Technologies Emerge for Intimate Relationships

[WebStrategist] One of my favorite Marketing Technologist, Jeremiah Owyang, provided four observations from SXSW.

My Take: First of all, if you don’t follow Jeremiah, you should. The Altimeter group is spectacular.  Second, I particularly agree with his point regarding proximity based apps. Their value is debatable. What’s not debatable is what they do to your smartphone battery. Today’s hardware technology just can’t support such intensive software.

3. Every Awesome Moment You Missed at SXSW [PICS] 

SxSW

SxSW

[MashableTech] Nice photo set from Mashable. Tough to take pictures due to the nasty weather.

My Take: So far I’ve published two sets of photos: people and signs.

4. “Winning” SXSW Has Yet To Produce A Winning Business

[TechCrunch] Tech Crunch points out that SxSW has failed to launch any big apps since Twitter and Foursquare.

My Take: Right on! I didn’t see anything big launch; I wondered if we were in a tech lull, but then I realized Pinterest had the biggest buzz. And Pinterest launched a few years ago and broke big recently.

5. 2012 SXSW Interactive by the Numbers

[ExploringConversationalMedia] Jeff Esposito (who I somehow failed to see in Austin) posted an interesting infographic regarding SxSW.

The Start-Up of YOU: 21st Century Career Strategy

sxsw kitty

The Start-Up of YOU: 21st Century Career Strategy

I attended this session because my role as a Marketing Technologist often feels “squishy”. There aren’t a lot of Marketing Technologists in the wild. And I hoped this would give me some tips on how to advance my role and the value I can provide. Not sure it met those needs, but I thought the speakers provided important advice.

Social Tags:

  • @bencasnocha
  • @quixotic
  • #startYOU
Ben Casnocha & Reid Hoffman

Ben Casnocha & Reid Hoffman

[notice]The working world has changed[/notice]

  • Career Escalator doesn’t work anymore
  • Death of the traditional career path
  • Company’s are no longer loyal to employees and vice versa

So What Do We Do About It?

  • It’s a very similar to what entrepreneur’s experience in starting a new business
  • Mindset = “Permanent Beta” – circumstances are always in flux, you are always a work in progress
  • Example: Jeff Bezos starts each communication with “it’s day one”

Develop THREE Specific Skills

  1. Plan to Adapt
  2. Strengthen Your Network
  3. Take Intelligent Risks

1. Plan to Adapt

Life is not like a set of dominos that you set up and knock down. You need to have “Flexible Persistance” the ability to move forward with purpose, but able to readily adapt.

Plan to Adapt in 140

  • Engage in career planning but don’t set firm plans
  • Plan A is what you’re doing right now, your current implementation of your competitive advantage
  • Always think about Plan Bs: parameters of motion, possible pivots
  • Always have a Plan Z: a certain fallback option where you can reset.

ABZ Planning

Plan A – Current execution strategy

Plan B – Set of opportunities and how you might move

Plan Z – (what allows you to take risks) What to do when things trend negative. Planning framework provides a way to strategically adjust to the situation.

2. Strengthen Your Network

Develop strong alliances and loose ties. Strong alliances are mutually beneficial partnerships. Loose ties are acquaintances that you develop. The benefit of loose ties is the add diversity to you world. Your friends tend to act and do as you do. New ideas and opportunities are less likely to come from your close network, but loose ties may work in different cities or industries and will inject a diversity that you cannot get from your close network.

Network Building in 140

  • Entrepreneurs build networks to build companies. You need a virtual company around you in your career
  • Be explicit about who your professional allies are. Help them and let yourself be helped
  • Weaker ties tend to introduce diverse streams of intelligence, and alert you to different sorts of opportunities

3. Take Intelligent Risks

Lean into risk. Position yourself where luck can help you. Always have several options that may pan out. Manage risk by vaccinating yourself against it. Introduce a bit of risk into your career to be more flexible and adaptive. Taking small risks builds career resilience.

Take Intelligence Risk in 140

  • Many think you get career stability by minimizing all risk. Ironically, in a changing world, tha’s one of the riskiest things you can do
  • If you don’t find risk, risk finds you
  • Volunteer for extra work, run experiences, change jobs, freelance
  • By introducing regular volatility into your career, you make surprise survival able. You learn to “absorb shocks gracefully”

Photo Credit [sxsw]

Learn to Code and Make the Software You Want

sxsw kitty

Learn to Code and Make the Software You Want

I attended this session because I want to be more self sufficient as a Marketing Technologist and not rely on developers as much as I am. It turned out to be my favorite session. Background: Neither of them could code a few years ago. They walked the audience through the steps they went through to learn to code. They learned how to create the ideas in their mind and bring them into the world.

Social Tags:

  • @innonate
  • @vacanti
  • #sxhope

Pre-requisites

You have to have a specific need, not “I need to code.”

[important]One and only one pre-requisite: really, really need something specific to be built.[/important]

Outsourcing your code dev is difficult. They don’t know what’s in your head. No matter how long your documented tech spec requirements are they can’t make realtime decisions about what feels right they way you can. A benefit of being able to create your own code allows you to test out the ideas before involving partners, investors or anyone else.

The Big Secret:

[important]”It’s not that hard”[/important]

Both continually had the realization that coding is not as hard as it seems. The ecosystem has grown up and it’s easier for non-coders to code. In the last 5 years it’s gotten much easier.

What Does it Take?

[important]”The Sweat Lodge”[/important]

Take a chunk of time and do nothing but learn to code. Sweat it out. At the end of Day 1 and 2 – Westheimer still had no clue on what he was doing. After 5 days he finally had a clue of how to achieve accomplish his coding goal. You need a dedicated block of time to get over the early hump. Although coding easier, there are somethings that are really, really hard and you need dedicated time to work through it.

 

Nate Westheimer

Nate Westheimer

Vinicius Vacanti

Vinicius Vacanti

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Coding Components: High-Level Explanation in 3 steps

User Request: “http://yourdomain.com/actions?details=number_two”

Server: “Yo app! I got this request. Check it…”

Your App: “Sweet! Going to do some magic. Here’s the result.”

Things Not To Worry About

Don’t worry about much – get it up and running.

  • Security
  • Scaling Issues
  • Writing Beautiful Code
  • Maintainability of Code

When you’ll need these things, you’ll either have a team to do it or you’ll have moved on.

Learning Python/Django

Vicante bought the O’Reilly book, read 4 chapters and that was enough to understand the basics. Django sits on top of Python. Start by learning the basics of Python. Examples of Django include Instagram and Hunch Resources:

Learning Ruby on Rails

Resources Westheimer used:

So which one should you learn? –> Python or Ruby?

Doesn’t matter which, but you do have to pick. Decision criteria: Do you know someone you can call for help? Can you call them in a tough moment?

Learning HTML/CSS

Resources: (affiliate links)

Help Yourself

[important]24 hour rule. Figure it out. Don’t ask for help for 24 hours[/important]

It’s okay to write ugly code that works.  You learn by trying. There is value in that journey, it’s better than a leg up by phoning a friend.

Still Need Help? Just Ask

If after a day you haven’t solved the problem, go to an online forum. Responses often happen the same day. Resources:

 

Open-Source Projects

At the moment there are well over 4,000 site examples with the code. It’s a great way to see how others are solving a similar problem. Check out djangosites.com.

Sites They Built:

Find Authors At:

Photo Credit [sxsw]

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