Social media is the new black
Social media marketing is the new black. Everyone is talking about it. Well, ok, it’s mostly consultants trying to get their pitch out. Most of the articles I’ve seen tend to focus on an SEO angle… produce more content, use more keywords, build more in-bound links… and cha-ching. But reducing social media to only a marketing strategy misses the point of social media: it’s a means of communication. You know, dialogue with real human beings.
Let’s say it’s 1889 and a businessman comes to you, the consultant, and says, “I hear about this thing called the telephone. I think it’s going to be big. How can I develop a telephone strategy?” Of course, the telephone isn’t the strategy, it’s a means to an end. It’s a way of having conversations with your audience.
Like the telephone, social media can be abused. Do Not Call lists have sprung up to prevent interruptions at dinner and the general annoyance that comes from script-reading telemarketers. Social media such as blogs and Twitter may be opt-in, but it can be equally annoying to stumble upon contrived sales pitches and SEO keyword stuffed articles. Disingenuous conversations are the ones people leave.
In other words, social media is, above all, about keeping it real.
Improving email open and click-throughs by purging your email list
Email marketing research has determined that the common subscriber turn-over for an email marketing contact list is 30% annually and 2.5% monthly. — Article Alley
It’s really cool to tell your executive team that you have 25,000 subscribers to your e-newsletter, but what if only 20% of them open the newsletter each month? (A good rate by some standards, but not GREAT) In a list of tens of thousands of email addresses, these obsolete addresses can cost a company thousands of dollars annually in ISP fees. The carbon cost on the servers is probably small — until you add up the cost of all the companies globally that continue to ping dead addresses. And besides, what’s the point of sending email to someone that’s no longer there?
That’s why we just purged our email list of inactive email addresses.
The email that was sent to inactive email addresses
We identified the email addresses that were inactive and then emailed all those people with a final warning that, unless they raised their hand now, we were going to remove them from the list. The “warning” email was a both a courtesy and offered us some protection in case our reporting had culled names of people that were still reading the newsletter. Sure enough, a few people did come forward and even Tweeted about it.
All in all, it was a great exercise and one that we’ll be sure to reproduce every year. Read about the details here.
Big Movember Thank You
A huge thank you to everyone that supported me in my Movember quest. I am happy to report that today is my last day of public humiliation — humiliation that netted $365 in donations from friends and family that will be put towards a great cause. I had been leading my Mo-team in donations, but this Thanksgiving holiday was clearly very very good to two of my teammate who out-moed me by raising $423 and $673.35 respectively. I’m happy to have the competition to fight cancer.
Thank you, one and all!
Movember
What’s Movember? Movember is an annual, month-long “celebration” (their words, not mine!) of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues — specifically prostate and testicular cancer. I had never heard of Movember until I started working for an Australian-headquartered company where I’ve watched as my male colleagues have grown ‘staches for the last four years. This year, I’m going to join them… much to the consternation of my wife who would like nothing less than to see fur beneath my schnoz.
This is a really tough year to give to charity — and there are lots of charities asking for our help — but if you have $5 or $10 that you can donate, I would really appreciate it. My donation page is here. Thanks for your help! And come back in 25+ days to see my ‘stache!
Spam gets relevant
Going through email at work this morning and saw that a relevant, decent comment came through on a blog post from last year. I was about to respond to the comment when I noticed the funny (not haha funny) name of the commenter.
How did a spam bot write a relevant comment? This must be a copycat spam bot. Smart, but not that smart.
copycat spam bot
Anatomy of an agile campaign
Back in another day and time, I wrote a blog post about transparency in marketing. This post today is about authenticity, and how Atlassian created a campaign that focuses on the user experience rather than the marketing message.
One of the several announcements Atlassian made at its first ever worldwide user conference was the launch of a new minisite, Agile @ Atlassian. While we were not Agile subject-matter experts, we could provide some important insights into our own understanding of Agile. That’s an important distinction, because it guided our decision on how to produce a campaign. There’s an excellent TED talk by Joseph Pine on creating an authentic voice in marketing. Our campaign was based on creating this type of authentic talk based on our experiences rather than on marketing messages.
A site is born.
Atlassian’s developers have been doing agile for 7 years, and many of our customers do as well using our developer tools. “Agile” in this context relates to how software developers engineer products. The Agile Manifesto and hundreds (thousands?) of agile evangelists are spreading the gospel that there’s an “enlightened” way to code.
Many people don’t know how to take advantage of Atlassian tools for agile software development. In fact, there’s a whole lot of agile developers that are searching for better ways and tools to make their team agile. Atlassian’s software was engineered more broadly to be used by any type of development, but they can be used for agile software development, and the mini-site provided a glimpse into how we take advantage of our own tools for agile.
Thus, Agile @ Atlassian was born. The campaign breaks down as follows:
- We spent a grand total of $1000 on the campaign and minisite — the money was spent on a professional videographer to tape our developers talking about how they do their jobs.
- The mini-site was designed and produced by our in-house design and web teams. The videos were edited and pimped out by an endlessly talented and creative developer on the marketing team.
- We included previously recorded customer webinars with S1 Corp and Replicate Tech that discuss how customers user our products for agile.
- Atlassian developers have been blogging about agile@atlassian, and an RSS feed of their blogs is included on the mini-site.
- New product descriptions were written to emphasize how our products can be used in an agile environment.
- To tie up all the loose pieces — videos, blogs, webinars — we design a brand for the agile@atlassian series that appears in the the blogs and anywhere agile is found on our website.
- We used the campaign as a platform to announce our latest agile project management offering, GreenHopper.
One Twitterer wrote:
“Listening to agile@Atlassian while working. I’m a huge Atlassian fan and this is a nice peak into their world.“
Since launching, the minisite has seen over 6,000 visits, with the average person viewing 5.63 pages on the site/visit. This is a short recap of the effort we put into the site, and I think it’s a very good template for other B2B marketers for creating similar campaigns, esp. those who dare to go from a marketing voice to an authentic one.
Making a good newsletter even better
We recently went through a redesign of the Atlassian newsletter. The newseltter, we decided, had become long in the tooth, it was time for a refresh. I’ve read up on Newsletter design at MarketingSherpa and other sites, and our team had a pretty good idea for how we wanted to see it evolve.
But before taking the plunge, we wanted feedback from our subscribers. What do they think about it? Are we the only ones bored with the design, or are others hoping for a change? Can the content be improved, and if so, how?
Over 100 people responded to our survey that went to newsletter and blog subscribers. Here’s one of my favorite replies:
Generally, I regard the Atlassian newsletter as one of the best produced by any company. A good blend of company news, products news and things of general interest.
Wow! Others concurred.
Only that it is about the best I have ever seen in ANY company – (x30 or more I have seen). Also that it has jumped and improved a lot more in the last 5 months, from my outward perspective. You guys are rockin’ it! But you know that. Keep it up!
Nice clean, feature rich, informative and well organized.
It is great. In general I think Atlassian is my favorite design/structure of all my various newsletters. I also really like the random links at the end, usually I find 1 or 2 really useful links.
It wasn’t all rosy — there was a good deal of constructive feedback too. We’ve posted more comments and displayed the before/after design on the Atlassian Blog. Curious readers can subscribe to the Atlassian newsletter here. Our next steps are to monitor clicks and open rates to see if that improves over time.
If you’ve re-designed your newsletter lately, please let me know, I’m very curious to see more examples and learned how others have done it.
