From the Front Lines - Bulding a New Media Marketing Blueprint

by John Stone 10/21/2008 5:38:00 PM

Today, Mark Boisvert - an account executive here at CrossTech - and I were in a working session with the online marketing team from a big brand in the network and telephony space. Currently, they operate a major web site with a rich aray of content and are undergoing a site redesign that is about to launch. They are asking how they use new media strategies to accelerate the velocity and visibility of the site and move their page views from 6.6 million to 8.8 million in a year.  We are targeting a number of "visibility" metrics - gone are the days where SEO or SEM will address the challenge:

Technorati rank
Technorati fans
Google Indexed pages
Alexa ranking
Inbound links
Del.icio.us bookmarks
Computerworld, InformationWeek citations
Newsletter subscribers
 

How should they go about it?

We  are recommending four interrelated strategies:

Intelligence: Understanding audience influence and impact – both on their site and across the web

Content: Delivering and communicating compelling and credible content that their audience wants

Relationship: Building relationships and engaging in conversations with their audience

Network: Optimizing visibility and connecting and linking across the broader web

 

Our new media marketing maturity model helps us assess where they are today so we can put together a new marketing blueprint:

1. Online Focus Group “Project Dogfood”:

Goal: Understand audience and develop innovative ideas
Approach: Platform and Listening Campaign and Continuous Model

2. Influence Network Analysis

Goal: Understand the optimal networks that you need to be engaged and participating
Approach: Identify passionate and authentic brand influencers and activists

3. Intelligence Platform and Service

Goal:  Understand today’s network impact and measure over time
Approach: Listening Platform and Monitoring Services, Dashboard of Metrics

4. Site Enhancement Program

Goal: Enhance content and relationship capabilities to drive value
Approach:  Site maturity analysis, feature set envisioning and prioritization

5. Outreach Program

Goal: Influence the influencers to drive visibility and velocity
Approach: Blogger relations management, including outreach, relationship development, educational programs including webisodes/ twebisodes, FAQ


 

Be the first to rate this post

  • Currently 0/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Tags:

Blogs | RSS Feeds | Search | Social Networking | new media

Ready for New Marketing Summit?

by John Stone 10/13/2008 5:45:00 PM

Nick Saber told me I need to be at the New Marketing Summit at Gillette Stadium by 7AM in the morning - and I still need to do my taxes!

It is going to be a great event with over 300 registered attendees. I am going to both learn and share. Over the last 6 months we have been very busy developing our services and offerings in the growing area of digital marketing. Every day we speak to clients about their digital strategy. I usually boils down to a need for 1) integrated data; 2) relationship marketing with social media 3) next generation event technology and 4) new, compelling web site experience and "web 2.0". At NMS, I am looking forward to speaking - along with Chris Brogan - about four scenarios for using Project Dogfood.


1.New Product Launch
2.More Eyeballs
3.Product R&D
4.A Version 2.5 Event

Be the first to rate this post

  • Currently 0/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Tags:

Social Networking | Digital Marketing Platform

How Well Do You Know Your Customers?

by TJ O'Connor 10/13/2008 11:28:00 AM

Many marketing-savy organizations have large data warehouses that are used to capture information about customers, including: magazine subscriptions, event registration, product registration, membership renewal, etc…

The problem is that most of these databases are creating a new customer record every time someone fills in a registration form. This makes is difficult to report a single customer across different databases.

For the last few years, our team over at CrossTech has been developing a solution called Master Data Management (MDM). This solution integrates into our overall platform, and is used to integrate your disparate data sources into a centralized repository for reporting and analysis. This article will discuss some of the benefits of organizing, analyzing, and reporting on your data using the MDM.

Building a Central Repository
Servers The first step when implementing the MDM tool is to create a centralized database that contains a snapshot of all the data sources in your infrastructure. This process involves examining the relationships between your various databases, creating a list of business rules that dictates how the data should flow, and cleaning up your existing data. Once this step is complete, you will have a centralized database that provides a single, complete view of each customer, prospect, or audience member.

Single View of the Customer
Customer Let’s say you send out an email to registrants for a certain event asking them to subscribe to your publication. Wouldn’t it be helpful to exclude people who are already subscribers? Sending these people marketing materials for something they are already subscribed to shows them you aren’t really considering their needs, just marketing to a list. Providing targeted interest-based marketing materials will give you a higher click-through rate, and increase ROI.

Advanced Reporting Capability
ChartSo now you have a single view of your audience. What are they doing? How are they using your website? What events have they attended? What marketing materials have they responded to? Once your MDM solution is implemented, you can take advantage of several layers of analytics and business intelligence tools that allow you to accurately measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Struggling with your audience data? Looking to grow your internal infrastructure? To learn more about our Master Data Management tool, contact Brett Wohl at bwohl@crosstechpartners.com.

Currently rated 5.0 by 1 people

  • Currently 5/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Tags:

Master Data Management | Digital Marketing Platform

Guilt by Association

by John Stone 10/9/2008 3:29:00 PM

Social Media and the Network effect? Metcalf’s Law will help more traditional media types gain more insight into the phenomenon of social media and why it is driving visibility.

I just came back from lunch with Frank Fortin. Frank leads communications and marketing initiatives at Massachusetts Medical and blogs at http://frankfortin.wordpress.com. Frank told me how Massachusetts Medical pursued traditional media outlets when communicating their law suit over the doctor ranking system. They found some typical results. However once the news hit the blogosphere, Google rankings and visibility shot through the roof. Association’s members were happy and the Association gained visibility and relevancy.

It makes sense - visibility increases exponentially with the “network effect” described by Metcalf’s Law. I am inundated by information and I wrote and article in 2004 on the topic (focused on enterprise information management – inside the firewall).

For the public web, the search box remains my window to the information and the conversations I access every day across the net. (the database of intentions) I also use Twitter and Facebook and that is how I get insight on the relevancy of content – what are my friends saying?

Next up - perhaps a better “relevancy engine” to filter my results?

Be the first to rate this post

  • Currently 0/5 Stars.
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Tags: , , , , ,

Blogs | Social Networking

[Sign in]

Powered by BlogEngine.NET 1.4.0.0
Custom Theme by CrossTech Partners

About the Authors

As consultants for CrossTech Partners, we manage a digital marketing platform and develop a range of Rich Internet Applications and ASP.NET applications using various Web 2.0 technologies, AJAX, RSS, and lots of other innovative technologies.

E-mail me Send mail