Product Description

“What’s the one thing companies care about? Conversion. Getting potential customers to convert into real, actual, customers. But how do you do that in a world of Facebook, Google, YouTube, blogs, and Flickr? Mike Moran shows you how—by trying lots of little things, studying the results, learning quickly from your failures, and doing it all over again. He gives you a framework for getting over your fears of talking with your customers without a committee to protect your behind. Great book.”

–Robert Scoble
Video blogger of the Scoble Show and Co-author of the top-selling corporate blogging book, Naked Conversations

Start Fast, Fix Fast, and Fix Again: Marketing for Breakthrough Results

For decades, marketers have been taught to carefully plan ahead because “you must get it right–it’s too expensive to change.” But, in the age of the Web, you can know in hours whether your strategy’s working. Today, winners don’t get it right the first time: they start fast, change fast, and relentlessly optimize their way to success. They do it wrong quickly…then fix it, just as quickly!

In this book, Internet marketing pioneer Mike Moran shows you how to do that–step-by-step and in detail. Drawing on his experience building ibm.com into one of the world’s most successful sites, Moran shows how to quickly transition from “plan then execute” to a non-stop cycle of refinement.

You’ll master specific techniques for making the Web’s “two-way marketing conversation” work successfully, productively, and profitably. Next, Moran shows how to choose the right new marketing tools, craft them into an integrated strategy, and execute it…achieving unprecedented efficiency, accountability, speed, and results.

• The indispensable online marketing guide for every CMO, brand marketer, direct marketer, online marketing specialist, strategist, and entrepreneur
• Learn more from your customers–and learn it faster
• Systematically measure online marketing results–and improve them
• Create deeper relationships with your customers on the Web
• Leverage podcasting, social networks, wikis, virtual worlds, search, viral marketing, blogs, and other new tools
• Build a lean, mean conversion machine
• Preview new innovations you’ll be implementing next year and the year after
• Overcome the organizational, political, and personal obstacles that keep marketers doing things the “old-fashioned” way

Foreward xv

Preface xvii

Acknowledgements xxiii

About the Author xxvii

Part 1: That Newfangled Marketing 1

Chapter 1: They’re Doing Wonderful Things with Computers 3

Chapter 2: New Wine in Old Bottles 21

Chapter 3: Marketing Is a Conversation 55

Part 2: That Newfangled Direct Marketing 103

Chapter 4: Going Over to the Dark Side 105

Chapter 5: The New Customer Relations 149

Chapter 6: Customers Vote with Their Mice 211          

Part 3: That Newfangled You 253

Chapter 7: This Doesn’t Work for Me 255

Chapter 8: This Won’t Work Where I Work 275

Chapter 9: This Stuff Changes Too Fast 315

Glossary 335
Index 365

About the Author

Mike Moran has worked on the Web since its earliest days, in both marketing and technical roles, including eight years at ibm.com, IBM’s customer-facing Web site. In 2008, Mike retired from IBM to pursue speaking, writing, and consulting, including serving as Chief Strategist for the digital communications agency Converseon.

Mike is also the author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, and he writes regular columns on search marketing for Revenue magazine, WebProNews, and Search Engine Guide. He’s a member of the Search Engine Marketing Council of the Direct Marketing Association and a charter member of the DMA’s Interactive Marketing Advisory Board. Mike is a frequent keynote speaker on Internet marketing at events around the world, serves as a Visiting Lecturer to the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing.

Mike also has a broad technical background, with over 20 years experience in search technology working at IBM Research, Lotus, and other IBM software units. He led the product team that developed the first commercial linguistic search engine in 1989 and has been granted four patents in search and retrieval technology. He led the integration of ibm.com’s site search technologies as well as projects in content management, personalization, and web metrics. Mike led the adoption of search marketing at ibm.com back in 2001 and pioneered product search facilities that dramatically raised conversion rates. Mike was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2005.

Mike can be reached through his Web site (www.mikemoran.com), which is also the home of his Biznology newsletter and blog.

Product Description

Stop pushing your message out and start pulling your customers in

Traditional “outbound” marketing methods like cold-calling, email blasts, advertising, and direct mail are increasingly less effective. People are getting better at blocking these interruptions out using Caller ID, spam protection, TiVo, etc. People are now increasingly turning to Google, social media, and blogs to find products and services. Inbound Marketing helps you take advantage of this change by showing you how to get found by customers online.

Inbound Marketing is a how-to guide to getting found via Google, the blogosphere, and social media sites.

• Improve your rankings in Google to get more traffic
• Build and promote a blog for your business
• Grow and nurture a community in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
• Measure what matters and do more of what works online

The rules of marketing have changed, and your business can benefit from this change. Inbound Marketing shows you how to get found by more prospects already looking for what you have to sell.

Product Description

Social Media Marketing – How Data Analytics helps to monetize the User Base in Telecoms, Social Networks, Media and Advertising in a Converged Ecosystem Social media marketing is a mechanism to interact with a set of online social media conversations from a marketing perspective, based on converged media (since conversations span technologies and media). Social media marketing is measurable via a set of social media metrics. These metrics function as the proverbial ‘air traffic control’ monitoring the domain in almost real time. Based on the data driven dials of this interface, the marketer monitors these many way conversations. Many way conversations take place between the marketer and the participants in a social network – but also amongst the participants themselves. The marketer benchmarks the insights gained from these conversations against a set of transactional data (sales, surveys etc) to monitor and tweak a series of narrowcast (long-tail) campaigns. Thus, instead of having one large ‘broadcast’ campaign – we have many small narrowcast, interactive and ongoing campaigns. The campaigns and conversations are based on a feedback loop, hence they are iterative and form an ongoing learning experience. The extent of social media marketing campaigns include social media advertising, but could also encompass product development, trend monitoring, reducing churn, benchmarking and so on. Specifically, social media marketing can be used as a part of a two stage process: first, to identify certain patterns in data, secondly to verify those observations by specific social media campaigns which also seek permission from the customers. The provider sends personalised messages to the receiver, and over time, the visibility of the participant’s digital footprint grows and leads to better personalization. Therefore, we start with passive digital footprints (based on data patterns) and transition to active digital footprints (based on trust). Data and privacy form the bedrock of this multi-way conversation between the marketer and the participants. Ultimately, we see the participants and the marketer enter into a trusted relationship based on transparency where the participants share data about themselves and entrust the marketer with their data in return for better and personalised services. This book can help you to – * Understand the world of Social media from the perspective of the Web (social media), mobile/telecoms and traditional media * Understand the significance of data within social networks * Work with social media metrics like Alpha users, cost-per-relevant-audience and others * Learn from case studies from enterprises who have successfully used the social media marketing approach * Learn how to deploy social media marketing campaigns * Recognise the growing significance of Privacy in Social media marketing This book would appeal to anyone in the social media, mobile/telecoms and traditional media worlds, as well as to businesses wishing to become involved in Social Media Marketing.