It's called "Twitter"...

...and it's creating a huge amount of buzz. I've read reports that says that it's:

• addictive
• a micro-blogger's dream tool
• to blogging what the phone is to the pony express

Is it really that good? I had to try it out. I headed over to www.twitter.com, registered for an account, and linked it to my phone via SMS.

So basically, it's a way to provide status updates to people who subscribe to your feed (via RSS or through the Twitter web site), very similar to "status updates" that Facebook already has. Those status updates on Facebook seem to be pretty popular, especially for mobile FB users who continually update them...

For the rest of us, I'm not sure how great Twitter's going to be -- at least in this form. What I really was hoping for was a way for me to post to my blog via phone. Guess what -- I can. Blogger lets you do that. Thanks but no thanks, Twitter.

Okay, I guess that this will have some applicability for the same type of people who keep updating their Facebook status. What I'm excited about seeing is how a company can use this new "micro-blogging" to its advantage for marketing. Maybe a CEO micro-blog where he/she can just post cool ideas that they come up with -- almost like a stream of CEO's consciousness? What about a conference update tool? One person can sit in a session and post (and record) notes for other people who can read them on a computer or a phone. Hmmmm. This could be pretty cool... Revolutionary? I'm not sure -- time will tell.

4 Lessons Learned from Direct Mail Campaign

Direct mail -- Yawn, right? I mean, DM has been done every which-way, that it seems impossible to make a campaign driven by mailers work anymore. However, based on the audience (association execs) and budget, I decided that this would be the best way to hit our audience during a pre-show campaign for an upcoming conference that we were attending.

I changed it up a bit, however. Instead of doing one mailer with the typical info on it ("come visit our booth!"), I decided to follow send four mailers out and slowly reveal more information as we got closer to the conference. Here's what I sent out:

10 days prior to conference:

7 days prior to conference:

















4 days prior to conference:
















1 day prior to conference:
















What you are unable to see in these pics is the writing on the back. Each mailer revealed a little more information as we got closer to the event. I didn't even put my company's address, name, or logo until the last postcard. This led to a recipient getting excited everytime a new mailer would arrive. I no longer had to fight to hold his/her interest -- they were looking for my mailer.

This direct mail campaign ended up having about a 10% conversion rate (we counted a conversion as a visit to our booth). Not bad considering that MarketingSherpa benchmarks the average response rate to a DM campaign at 6%. But what was even better was that the 10% of recipients who showed up to the booth were emotionally tied to this mailer. They had put in so much time trying to figure out who was sending them these cards that by the time came for them to come to the conference, my booth was at the top of their list to visit. They also were very interested in the item that I was promoting: our take on a IT maturity model.

4 Lessons Learned:

1) An emotional connection can drive conversions in a DM campaign just like they do in any other medium. I found that the messaging from this campaign even spread virally -- recipients brought asked for their coworkers' help in figuring out who was sending these mailers.

2) 3D mailers will almost always prove to be more effective than flats. The thing that I would've changed if I were doing this campaign again would be to use a mailer that stuck out more in a stack of mail. A couple of recipients remarked that they didn't receive all four mailers, later to realize that they accidentally threw one out.

3) When running a campaign like this, each mailer should have enough information to stand on its own. Each of these mailers built on the previous ones, so if someone missed the first mailer, they didn't understand the rest of them.

4) DM can work -- if you do it in a unique and creative way. Who knew, right?

Welcome Back!

Riiiiiight. So remember how I said that a blog is a conversation with an audience and the only way for it to be successful is to update it at regular intervals? Basically, this is Blogging 101 here. Well guess what -- I dropped the ball! The past two weeks have been crazy busy with some new campaigns coming out from the company as well as an additional volunteer project I'm working on. I'll tell you a little bit about that later -- meanwhile, we should talk about something that's on everyone's minds right now:

The NCAA Tournament.

So you've probably already filled out your brackets and submitted them to your pools, as have I. For those of you on Facebook, you might have noticed the new "Pools" feature on there. It's great -- it allows all of the previous social interaction that this event would bring to happen online at this site.

Even better (for us marketers), have you seen how they're monetizing it?

This is a pool sponsored by STA Travel. What a great way for a company targeting students and young adults to penetrate this market. It's viral, it's relevant, and I would bet that no one thinks "Oh great, another ad" like they do while watching TV.

This is where I think marketing and advertising is headed -- serving ads to people who don't recognize the fact that what they're looking at is actually an ad.

What do you think?