SmartMarket Media Blog

Mike Langford, CEO of Tweetworks, was kind enough to invite me to participate as part of a panel discussion about social media for the Metro-West Chamber of Commerce. I was joined on the panel by Mike and two others; Cappy Popp of Thought Labs and Jeff Cutler of JeffCutler.com

The title for the panel discussion was “Linked in – How to Increase Sales” however given all of our diverse backgrounds with using social media in all different ways, it quickly evolved into a broader discussion about how we use and recommend using social media for business.

Jeff had some great recommendations for finding the “pulse” of online conversations going on around your company online and using Google Alerts to find those conversations. Mike had a great analogy of how social media is really no different than going to a Chamber networking mixer. Cappy’s reminder that in social media you need to “give” if you want to “receive” to build a brand following falls right in line with Mike’s analogy too. Networking online using social media is virtually the same (other than the technology) as networking in person. It’s all about building relationships.

I’ve shared Mike Langford’s video recording of the panel discussion. Although the still on the video looks like I am about to break into song…I assure you that doesn’t happen. I wouldn’t torture my blog readers with my horrible singing voice. Enjoy!

How Stanford University increased alumni donations.

Seeing how I’ve already talked about how integrating video in your email marketing can increase your click throughs by 175% I thought I’d profile another success story I read about online. Much of the information on this is exerpted from a great blog post by Tyler Willis for MediaPost called “When Juggernauts Collide: Email Marketing Meets Video Marketing” Here are the highlights of what I found most interesting from his post.

“Recent grads are far more likely to give a valid email address than a number (93% of the captive population vs. 38%), meaning that email marketing gives Stanford a better and more widespread ability to connect.”

Snail mail and “dialing-for-dollars” are incredibly inefficient ways to connect with new grads. Namely because direct mail is assumed to be junk mail by most recipients and you only get a response of about 2% (if you are lucky). Phone calling on the other hand is incredibly interruptive, who knows what the end user was doing or what you interrupted them from doing. Email is passive and can be opened or read when the end user is ready to read or respond to it.

Scott Jahnke, the Director of Student and Young Alumni Development, explains why he chose to combine email AND video as part of Stanford’s new alumni drive “Technology gives us the ability to do so much more than just text. How then, can we most effectively tell our story to thousands of people and inspire them to give? I believe that a combination of using email AND video to answer our three questions (why are we asking you for a gift, what is going to change if you give, and how will our organization make that change happen) is the so-called ’secret sauce.”

“At Stanford, the Young Alumni office produced several inspiring videos of students who had directly benefited from alumni contributions and attached a clear call-to-action to the end of each video, delivered via a Flash overlay that asked viewers to donate.”

This was key, by providing this call to action they were able to easily and effectively drive their alumni to take the steps they wanted them to take. Without a call-to-action, online video doesn’t effectively do it’s job.

“Calling out these videos, and providing a direct link to them in four out of five emails sent during Stanford’s fall campaign, helped increase gifts by 23% over the previous year’s fall campaign.”

This is a great first result and if they continue to refine their approach will probably become even more efficient. Couple this with the fact that they probably dramatically reduced their printing and postage costs from their direct mail campaign and/or their costs if they hired current students to do the telemarketing as part of a work study program. How does that affect their operational costs? Does it make their alumni gifts go longer.

If one of the most respected universities in the United States was able to buck the old trend of typical alumni gift campaigns and get these kind of outstanding results, what could combining the online marketing super powers of email marketing and online video do for your business or non-profit?

Nancy Giles is a regular opinion contributor to CBS Sunday Morning. Normally she has very witty, funny opinionated pieces as part of the show. This past week however I was disappointed. My disappointment was not in that she was taking a jab at Twitter…there are definitely ways to take clever jabs at Twitter and the people who use it, but Nancy Giles didn’t take that route.  My disappointment was that she clearly didn’t understand what makes Twitter so powerful and obviously had not used it. Here’s a link to her opinion on YouTube:

Her usual quick and witty opinion piece was about as blunt as a rubber mallet. Here’s the big point you are missing Nancy:

It’s about community

The Monday morning after this aired I went to an event (aka a TweetUp) organized by @AaronStrout in Arlington MA at a little coffee shop called Jam N’ Java at 8AM. I drove an hour in for this event. There were over 75 people who attended this event…all organized through Twitter. Yes Twitter is online but many people in the Twitter community actually like to get together at events as small as this or as large as SXSW. Here’s a picture of @JimStorer @ayemoah @alexa @esangenito and @AaronStrout at the event. Some people were networking for their business, some were meeting new people socially, some were continuing conversations they had started online. A few attendees were recently laid off and were there looking for potential employment opportunities or simply just for moral support and great conversation. The conversations were about everything from potential job opportunities in the current economy for a few to my conversation with @srdill about the finer points of vegetarianism.

It’s not about “What you are doing?”

Yes I understand that’s what the Twitter website says but if you actually take a minute to engage the community on Twitter you’d learn it’s less about the mundane “What you are doing?” and more about “What interesting article did you read?” or “Do you think the bailout plan will actually delay economic recovery?” Maybe even helping someone with a flat bicycle tire find a bike shop.

So Nancy Giles while your usual opinion pieces are spot on, this one…frankly was a dud. If you’d learned what Twitter is all about you’d know it’s about making connections, about conversation, it’s about engagement and most of all…it’s about community.

Getting Started with Twitter

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?