At Email Summit 2012, Luke Thorpe, Multimedia Specialist, MECLABS, grabbed his camera, I grabbed a mic, and we traveled the vast recesses of the expo floor at Caesars Palace to ask attendees and sponsors where the low-hanging fruit is for email marketers. Here’s what they had to say …
I have a good buddy, and our friendship dates way back to middle school. We don’t get to talk on the phone much anymore, but when we do, I really value it. Just getting to focus on him and his BUY VIAGRA! life and see how YOU SHOULD BEGIN WITH CHEAP RALPH LAUREN CLOTHES!
As you can see, the topic of today’s MarketingSherpa blog post is social spam. Social media is, inherently, a conversation. And, some marketers really understand that. They speak to their customers, listen to them, and don’t engage in antisocial media.
Even for the marketers who do get it, it’s so frustrating to deal with social spam. You’re trying to have a real conversation with your customers, and then some knucklehead autobot posts 50 comments about cheap Ralph Lauren clothes.
It’s an issue we deal with here on the MarketingSherpa blog. We use Akismet to filter out obvious spam, and monitor the rest of the comments manually. We have a high standard, so occasionally real comments get accidentally blocked (if that ever happens to you, just email me). Our goal is to make sure you draw value from the conversations taking place on this blog, not to simply up our comment counter.
To help you deal with social spam in your own social media marketing efforts, I talked to a few experts in the field.
The social spam challenge
“Email spam is a well-understood problem for which a large number of commercial solutions exist,” said Mark Risher, co-founder and CEO, Impermium. “Conversely, it’s still early days for social spam. Most social platforms lack an adequate content cleansing solution to address the multiple forms of abuse.”
That is why social spam is so prevalent. Mandi Frishman, Marketing Manager, Make Me Social, ran a quick test for the MarketingSherpa blog.
“I just went to Pinterest and typed ‘eggplant’ into the search bar. Of the first 14 pins, eight were from spam accounts. I’m overwhelmed by the sheer volume of social spam that I see each day, especially when running data pulls on behalf of clients.”
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Of course, Pinterest isn’t the only social sharing website facing this challenge. Tim Howell, Community Manager, Make Me Social, created a brief chart showing the prevalence of spam and Tweet Zombies in the electrical industry.
“We pulled 60 days’ worth of data from Twitter, which is typically the most common source of social spam,” he said.
“In the first pull, we brought in the full, unfiltered flow of posts from Twitter on a wide range of topics, brands and products in the electrical industry,” Tim said. “For the second pull, we applied a few filters to remove the most common signs of spam activity. It’s nearly impossible to remove all spam posts from this data, but even the most basic filters reduced the amount of spam by over 130,000 posts.”
But, you don’t only have to worry about competing with social spam on well-known social networking services — you have to keep your own sites clean as well.
“It not only plagues major platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but it affects the comment sections and forum boards of practically every news site and blog with a decent page rank,” Mark said.
“The Q1 samples we pulled from the Impermium global defense network revealed 4-8% of social Web traffic is spam, up from 2-5% just six months prior. While these numbers may sound relatively small, consider that in 2011, 90% of all social media users experienced some form abuse.”
On the afternoon of the first day of the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver, attendees had the chance to interact with ten expert practitioners in a roundtable format.
Event participants were able to choose an expert, sit at the table for a quick presentation, and ask questions and interact with each other on the topic at hand for 15 minutes before switching to a new table and a new subject.
Topics at the different tables ranged from optimizing social media to high-impact call-to-action button copy that converts.
I wanted to provide SherpaBlog readers with a sample of some of the high-impact material the experts shared during this roundtable session. These examples of roundtable content illustrate the wide variety of advice Optimization Summit attendees were presented during the session.
Here are some key takeaways from several of the roundtable experts:
“What is the objective of this page?” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin asked audience member Maile Keone at the Pre-Optimization Summit LPO Workshop in Denver.
“To get people to call.”
The problem is the page isn’t achieving the objective — at least not to the extent the marketers (including Maile) at VacationRoost want it to.
The page was plastered on two huge screens at the front of the room here at the Denver Marriott Tech Center with 150 marketers from around the world scrutinizing it.
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So, to help Maile and her team from VacationRoost, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin offered some recommendations for ways to improve the page.
To begin, we need to ask three critical questions from the perspective of the customer, Dr. McGlaughlin noted:
When we ask these questions, three optimization recommendations for the page come to mind.
I just arrived at the Pre-Optimization Summit workshop in Denver and caught the end of Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s Value Proposition Session.
In this Landing Page Optimization Workshop, Dr. McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, taught the live audience here at the Denver Marriott Tech Center about a simple case study drawn from the MarketingExperiments research library.
In the case study, Dr. McGlaughlin revealed how one company clarified the value proposition of a landing page for a 201% increase in captured leads.
Here are the details of that case study:
The Background:
The company in the case study was a B2B company (anonymized for its protection) selling data and mailing lists to other businesses. The goal of the page was to capture a lead.
The Control:
Here’s a screenshot of the control.
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The Treatment:
Here is a screenshot of the competing treatment.
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The Results:
And here are the results.
The winning treatment generated a 201% increase in captured leads by clarifying the value proposition of the page.
So, how can you, a B2B marketer, replicate the success of this case study? Throughout his presentation, Dr. McGlaughlin drew out some principles we could apply to our own pages.
PRINCIPLE #1: Frame your value proposition with customer logic
The first principle Dr. McGlaughlin mentioned is this:
“The value proposition must be framed with customer logic rather than company logic.”
The primary question we must answer to determine the value proposition of a page is in the first person: “If I am the ideal customer, why should I purchase from you rather than any of your competitors?”
By answering this question in the first person, we are able to view the message through the customer’s eyes. This is helpful because we most often view the message through our own “marketing” eyes.
PRINCIPLE #2: Determine the necessary derivative value propositions
“Customer logic demands an obvious connection between the company, its various products and its different prospects.”
While your company likely has a primary value proposition, your landing page may not be the best place for it. A landing page may have its own value proposition, while a PPC (pay-per-click) ad may have another one. All of these, however, are derived from the primary value proposition.
Dr. McGlaughlin grouped these derivative value propositions into four main categories:
PRINCIPLE #3: Map the micro-yes pathway for each product- and prospect-level value proposition
“For every product value prop, and for every prospect value prop, there is a micro-yes pathway up the side of the inverted funnel.”
When you are determining the product- or prospect-level value proposition, you must understand that your customer must make a series of micro-yeses before you can get to the ultimate yes, which is the conversion you are after. These yeses occur on the side of an imaginary inverted funnel.
To effectively communicate the value proposition on our lead capture pages, we must be able to map every micro-yes on the inverted funnel.
PRINCIPLE #4: Use the process-level value proposition to achieve each micro-yes
“For every micro-yes pathway there are a series of process-level value props.”
The last principle Dr. McGlaughlin mentioned ties everything together. To achieve the necessary series of micro-yeses, you must use process-level value propositions at each step.
In other words, every step in the process must answer this critical question:
“If I am the ideal customer, why should I take this next step rather than end the process?”
Related Resources:
Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions
How to Test Your Value Proposition Using a PPC Ad
How can small and medium businesses take advantage of mobile marketing? Aman Devgan, VP of Marketing, Web.com, joined us in the studio for the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action to talk about how you can apply discoveries from recent research by Web.com and MarketingSherpa …
If you’d like to jump ahead in the video, here is what Aman and I discussed:
0:32 – 84% of SMBs saw an increase in new business activity due to their mobile marketing efforts
1:12 – Surprisingly, providing better service to existing customers is a bigger motivator to invest in a mobile presence than attracting more local customers
1:54 – Top 2 hurdles in leveraging mobile marketing
The Boston Globe has been in the content business for a long time. The newspaper published its first edition on March 4, 1872. Now in the digital age, it offers a free online version. At the end of last year, the company decided to include a premium, subscription-based digital version as well.
This blog post reveals an early, inside look at the approach The Boston Globe is taking to launch a paywall, complete with an honest look at a few bumps the marketing team hit along the way.
Peter Doucette, executive director of circulation, sales and marketing, The Boston Globe, will present further information about the newspaper’s marketing efforts at the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit in Denver, June 11-14.
THE CHALLENGE
The marketing challenge for The Boston Globe is maintaining two Internet offerings, one free and one paid.
Peter says the issue is to grow digital consumer revenue while at the same time maintain and grow digital advertising revenue.
“In the end, how do you take a prospect and turn them into a customer?” he asks.
“Focus on what people value.” That is my main takeaway from my interview with Brian Solis, principal, The Altimeter Group. As he sees it, Facebook is a democracy, and you can’t simply shove marketing messages down your followers’ throats (or in this case, into their Timelines) and expect to be successful.
In our 10 minutes together, he discussed so much more, including why many social media marketers are misinterpreting the movie “Moneyball” …
Luke Thorpe, multimedia specialist, MECLABS, and I grabbed Brian Solis after his keynote at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012, and he graciously gave us 10 minutes packed with interesting marketing insights.
Here are a few key points in the video, in case you want to jump ahead:
0:09 – Social media marketing metrics and Facebook EdgeRank
1:30 – The unlike button
2:24 – How to find out what your customers want
3:56 – The American Express Link > Like > Love campaign
4:38 – How to talk to business leaders about what really matters in your social media marketing campaign
8:46 – Social media is not just conversations; it is business data
Related Resources:
Email Summit 2012 DVD Combo Special (includes the Brian Solis keynote)
In Social Media, Your Return Represents Your Investment
Social Media Marketing: Finding and winning hyper-social consumers
Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels
We asked for your nominations, tallied up the results, and now we want to know who has earned your vote … for the marketing industry blogs that you find most helpful.
What blogs have made you better at your job? Helped you garner impressive results for your company or clients? Reward those blogs by using the poll feature to vote for your favorites in the poll below, a list of the most-nominated blogs chosen by you, the MarketingSherpa audience.
It’s an interesting list. Some very established industry blogs; some I had personally never heard of before. You can vote in the poll below (in just one category, or in all the categories) and then scroll below the poll for links to these blogs if you’d like to learn more.
The top vote getters will receive the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Award in their category, as well as be invited for a very rare opportunity – to write a guest post on the MarketingSherpa Blog.
UPDATE: Voting has now ended. We’re now tallying up the votes, so be sure to check back later for the winners.
The news of Facebook’s recent IPO has mostly focused on technical glitches at NASDAQ. But, one question sits in the back of many marketers’ minds: Is this a sign that the social network will not continue its market dominance?
After all, we’ve seen the rise and fall of sites like Friendster and MySpace, along with the constant emergence of new social media platforms like Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.
So, in the midst of all this change, what is the biggest factor you should keep in mind when exploring social media platforms?
Not the social media platform itself, according to Kaci Bower, senior research analyst, MECLABS Content Group, and author of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Inbound Marketing Handbook. Kaci suggests you focus on your bigger inbound marketing strategy and architecture rather than relying on tying marketing to any one platform, even if it does have more than 800 million different users.
A strategic approach can give you a distinct competitive advantage
Integrating inbound tactics is the marketing equivalent of avoiding sugar and exercising every day, Kaci claims.
“The vast majority of marketers agree it’s critical, but a much smaller percentage follow through,” she says, citing MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report. “Seventy-six percent of marketers believe integrating SEO and social media is essential, but only 47% are actually doing it.
“A 30-point difference is huge,” continues Kaci. “It indicates the challenge of inbound marketing integration — it’s far easier to give it lip service than execute it.”
Lost in the noise
She suspects that is due to the massive amounts of information in the marketplace on SEO, social media and content creation. Consider this graphic that illustrates the complexity of the social media landscape by showing the huge amount of social media marketing and social networking tools and platforms.
Of course, you don’t have to use everything. Just use what works best for your company. As you can see in this chart from the Inbound Marketing Handbook, usage and effectiveness do not always consistently match. For example, two of the most hyped social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – showed significantly more usage than effectiveness. Meanwhile, blogs may be more effective than many marketers realize.
