Uncovering Compelling Insights

Steve Portigal. author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, is the founder of  Portigal Consulting. He has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories.

Steve speaks regularly at corporate events and conferences such as CHI, IxDA, Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. His articles about culture, design, innovation, and interviewing users have been published in interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, and Johnny Holland. He blogs at www.portigal.com/blog and tweets at @steveportigal.

Steve was gracious enough to secure a discount code for the book, IUBUSINESS901 for 20% off,  if purchased through Rosenfeld Media, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

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The Next Step in Cloud Computing

Tom left me thinking about the cloud and the possibilities in a totally different way. It’s not about technology. It’s about how we collaborate, work, influence and experience the world!

Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century) is my guest in this Thursday podcast. His work has been praised by luminaries such as Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, who called his writing, “a brilliant vision of where we must take our enterprises to survive and thrive.” And according to the late Peter Drucker, Tom’s writing “makes you question not only the way you run your business but the way you run yourself.”

I ask Tom in the podcast, “Who is going to read his book? He replied; It's not meant for the technologist. It's not a book about technology. It's for the businessperson who wants to understand how they can better leverage these new behaviors in the Cloud. It's for us as individuals, who will need to, in very little ways, be able to surf this tsunami of connections.” Tom is correct; however, he may be too modest. I believe the technologist will enjoy the book tremendously as they see their craft humanized in a way that may cause a little reflection of their own.

While listening to the Podcast – Get your Cloud IQ!

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About Thomas Koulopoulos: The author of eight books and founder of Delphi Group, a 20-year-old Boston-based think tank, which was named one of the fastest growing private companies in the US by Inc. Magazine. Delphi provides advice on innovation practices and methods to Global 2000 organizations and government agencies. He is also an Executive in Residence at Bentley University, the past Executive Director of the Babson College Center for Business Innovation, and past Executive Director of the Perot Systems Innovation Lab, which was acquired in 2009 by Dell Computer.

Tom’s Speaking Website: http://tkspeaks.com

Related Information:
Worry about Security in Cloud?
Does Lean create Innovative Companies?
Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell
Process Control Thoughts from the Poppendiecks

Great discussion on Content Marketing

Jason Fried is the founder and CEO of 37signals. Fried is a passionate leader in the field of simple, clear, and elegant web-based user interface design. He spearheaded the concept, design, and development of Basecamp, 37signal?s web-based project management tool for designers, freelancers, and creative services firms. Fried is also the co-author of Defensive Design for the Web.

Related Posts:
Marketing by Sharing Concept Explained
Can you Master Continuous Improvement?
If Nothing Bad Happens, You Must Be Doing Something Right?

Jason Fried, 37 Signals, Marketing by Sharing

Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals' products include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. 37signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework. 37signals' products do less than the competition - intentionally. Jason believes there's real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people's desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of 37signals products

Great Lesson on marketing by Jason. If you have not read Rework, Jason co-authored this, you should. His emphasis on sharing is very interesting. He has one blog post that has had 800,000 views and linked by 700,000 other sites.

Related Post:
Developing a Minimum Viable Product
Can you Master Continuous Improvement?
If Nothing Bad Happens, You Must Be Doing Something Right?

Successful Marketing should be a Game!

What keeps your attention? As a small business owner do you find yourself struggling to stay on top of your marketing, always something else to do? I would recommend to establish an effective marketing program that you create a game out of it. Creating a visual process with your Marketing Kanban can effectively do that and make your marketing interesting and challenging.

I read the recent book Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests and they recommended 5 ways to Game your business:

1. What consumer behavior are you trying to drive? Don’t just think about broad or bottom line objectives (“more engagement”, “greater brand exposure”) when considering ways in which you’d like to effect the behavior of your consumer base, but instead, focus in on easy-to-achieve activities that will have an overall impact on your bottom line.

2. Assign points to those behaviors. Think about how much value each of the behaviors has to your business and assign points to each action accordingly. Points should be weighed relatively, so if opening a new account is ten times more valuable than clicking on an advertiser’s link, make sure the point system reflects that reality.

3. Create a leaderboard to display points. Just like the Employee of the Month plaques at restaurants, create a socially-networked leaderboard that allows users to feel like they are accomplishing something relative to their friends and peers—A little encouragement goes a long way.

4. Develop challenges and message them. Just like Frequent Flyer promotions, creating simple challenges can have a profound effect on user behavior once they are connected to your community. Keep your challenges fresh and topical by knowing your players.

5. Make “fun” your goal! Whether your business is finance or funerary, making fun a principal objective will substantially increase consumer engagement and generate remarkable new revenue opportunities.

It is not as tough as you may think. Foursquare, Farmville, Chase, US Army and the old standby Frequent flyer programs are prime examples of Game Marketing. These are all strategies used for your customer. However, using a Marketing Kanban board within your organization can help make your own marketing a game. Think about a visual board showing some basic marketing metrics. If you started showing people how many times a subject was Re-tweeted or a Press Released viewed or published, would the quality of writing improve? What do you think?

Affiliate Marketing an easy way to make money – Fact or Fiction

What prompted this post was a blog post on American Express Open Forum by Chris Brogan. Chris is one of my favorite bloggers and someone that I have always held in very high esteem. However, when I read his post it left me the impression that he made Affiliate Marketing seem like an easy way to make money. He throws out the estimated numbers in 2009 for affiliate marketing of 13 billion. Heck at 13 billion, anyone can get a piece of that pie or can they?

I left a short comment on the post that I would like to expand on. As a disclaimer, I would like to mention that I make money on affiliate sales and have set up a few clients with affiliate programs. There is also affiliate links sprinkled through my website so be careful.

That all important Affiliate Link, that code that you get that is embedded in your links, banners, skyscrapers and anything else that will accept a hyperlink. All you have to do is embed it and people will click on it and you make money or do you.

Most links will register a client’s computer by embedding a cookie on to their computer. So what happens when a client cleans his cookies? What happens if he sees and discovers the product and investigates just enough before he clicks through and then searches for the site? And the one that is just about always the case is if you’re in B2B sales, how often does the purchase occur on the computer that was registered. Do you think the purchasing agent ask the requester whose site they found the product on? Do you think the requester even mentions it?

However, when your prospect is registered, what happens next? First there is typically a minimum payout and a time limit on how long the cookies last. Did you know most cookies expire in less than 90 days? Did you know that there may be a minimum threshold before sales are paid out? The thinking behind that is that you will have the highest registration in the initial 90 days and the least conversion. Meaning the affiliate resource gets the e-mail address to forever market too for a very limited if any cost.

The 13 billion dollar mark has spawned a highly competitive market for handling the affiliate resources account. There are some great ones out there and I am only here to discuss one thing. What happens when your affiliate resource switches suppliers? That’s right, your cookies all disappear and you have to re-register all of your prospects again. It also means you have to change all your links that you have created to the new one.

Read the fine print well, if there is any. I have been told that half my affiliate sales were non-commissionable because the people that clicked through my site were commissioned and they could not pay out commission to both of us.

This is my favorite bug-a-boo. I drive people to a site, they register and I now have a good solid lead. My affiliate resource starts sending him his auto-responder to sell the product therefore doing all the work. Hmm, work = auto-responder? He may convert a few, maybe not, but then what happens is that a new wave of auto-responders start being sent; selling my affiliate resource’s, affiliates! That’s right, my resource tries to move him into one of his affiliates and guess what, you don’t get to participate in this sale. No way, no how!

So now let’s get to the real skivvy, RUN THE NUMBERS! Nobody is going to tell you this but think about how many impressions you have to make to get a click-thru. Than how many leads turn into sales and then your payout. The truth is seldom is it better than direct mail numbers of 1 to 3%. So picking 2%, (and that is  very high on impressions to leads) if you have 10,000 impressions that is 200 leads and as a result 2 sales. If you make, $50 a sale that is $100 for your efforts. If you can accomplish, I would bet that you are doing better than 95% of the affiliates out there. So, look at two things: How much traffic does your website get or how big is your e-zine list? For the sake of explanation, let’s say my numbers above our correct. Are you willing to give up that number of leads to someone else for a $100.

Affiliate Marketing is not an easy way to make a living. You can participate in launches, book offerings and other affiliate efforts that could increase the odds of success and prove more successful. There are some great and I mean great partnership, coaching and program structures that could prove very lucrative for you. But if you are just looking for a cookie, in my opinion most would be better served in the hole they came from. What are your thoughts?

Need an internet presence, but don’t have the time

First let's answer the question: What do you have to do?

Get Found Online: To run a successful online business, people need to be able to find your website. You must improve your visibility.
Improve Your Traffic: You must use customized SEO and Social Media tasks that help you boost the number of visitors to your site.
Make More Money: Improving traffic, rankings and brand visibility will generate more sales from your website.

I found a nifty tool that I have been using the past month called Lotus Jump. When I first started using it, I thought it was really nothing more than a spreadsheet telling me to do the things I do to get my website found. However, after using it for a month, I found that it put me places that I have not been before. It did give me additional insight into place that I should be and links that I should be creating. All I have to do is allocate 30 minutes of my time or someone else time that can post content to create a web presence. It is simply not enough to have a website anymore you need a web presence. Read this case study about a simple Flower shop or watch a demo!

This fits into a very nice into a Standard Work Practice for developing an Online Presence. Or, it can be used as a brick in the foundation of Lean Marketing House.

Technorati Tags: SEO,Social-Media,Web-Traffic,Internet-Marketing

Can Social Media help your SEO

I had Chad H. Pollitt on the Business901  podcast discussing the effects of Social Media on SEO and what it can do for you. Chad has a unique view on what he terms successful SEO. He is not after achieving #1 or #2 ranking on Google for his customers, he is after achieving the entire 1st page for his customer. Listen to the podcast and find out some SEO tips on how you might be able to start on this path. Also we discussed, Chad's upcoming workshop on September 24th, 2009. Chad will be holding the Fort Wayne Chamber Business Brown Bag on "Cost Effective Marketing Using Social Media." If you are thinking of participating in a workshop on social media, this podcast is a good listen on how to evaluate Social Media workshops.

Chad H. Pollitt list of accomplishments include Internet Marketing Masters Certification from the University of San Francisco's prestigious School of Business and Management, BS in Entrepreneurship from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business.  He has won multiple awards in sales/marketing and sales management while working and residing in Fort Wayne, IN.  Chad is also a Lieutenant in the Indiana Army National Guard and a decorated veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Chad is currently works for Digital Hill Multimedia, Inc. as a Web Technology Consultant and Internet Marketing Manager and will be featured in The Wall Street Journal Sept. 16th.

Digital Hill Multimedia, Inc. was founded in 1997 as a web design agency with a focus on providing professional website solutions for businesses while helping them promote their business to the vast global audience on the Internet. Now with a more diverse clientele and with clients nationwide, Digital Hill Multimedia has grown to become a full-service Internet Marketing Agency.

By the way, if you do not think you can own an entire page on Google, do a search for "Fort Wayne Marketing Coach."

Technorati Tags: Fort Wayne Web Design,Internet Marketing Expert,Fort Wayne Internet Marketing,Fort Wayne Social Media,Fort Wayne SEO

Logic+Emotion - 2 new articles

 

 

"Logic+Emotion" Social Engagement Spectrum

Doing a bit of thinking of how to frame up some of the differences between traditional, digital and social initiatives—each has it's own set of properties, there is some overlap and there are also distinct characteristics. Thought it might help to apply them to a "spectrum of engagement"—the thought is that the more you move away from broadcast—(one way communication towers), the more participatory behavior and engagement with the business/brand etc will be had. The point isn't to replace any of these or place them in silos, but to simply illustrate a range at a high level.

Traditional Marketing
This is the marketing advertising mix that's prevailed over the years and has been perfected through broadcast and mass media techniques supported by a ratings system. It also could include some traditional PR, direct etc.

Tradigtial Marketing
Digital marketing has moved beyond it's infancy years and matured into something that's partially interactive, holds more promise for engagement, but incorporates traditional methodology. For example, a traditional Website may be interactive and technology dependent, but doesn't allow for user participation, feedback mechanisms reviews etc. Engagement can be increased through tactics such as interactive games or even a rich user experience, but there are no social components. Search methodologies are limited to things such as keyword, search optimization etc.

Social Engagement
Social engagement is created when design for participation is the primary strategy for the associated initiatives. Tactics can range from the simple to complex, but is primarily tasked with facilitating interactions from participant to participant to organization to participant(s) and vice versa. Social engagement carries distinct characteristics compared to "tradigital" in that it requires not only technology, but human intervention on the part of the organization in order to achieve the highest levels of engagement.
The gaps in between each stop represents where lots over overlap can exist. Anyway, it's a high level model. Thoughts appreciated.

Build a Referral Program for your E-zine

I have made just about every mistake possible in e-mail marketing and I am still learning. I have a list of 2500 but only get open rates of 20%. But I also have a client that gets open rates of over 50%. That list is only 600. Who has the better list? Without a doubt the one with 600 and it creates business. Why? It was created solely with direct sign-ups.

People want to increase e-mail mailing because it is free. But e-mail is not free. It takes effort, great content and current material. E-mail is struggling as a medium, it is still push marketing. But I have this junk mail theory, if it is cool enough, it is not junk. If an e-mail is worthwhile enough, it is not spam.

I believe an active small list allows you to target your message better and therefore have a more interested party. I would have a tendency to recommend not increasing their list but segregate it into more accurate groups. I think what makes a great list is creating more of a direct message to individual groups within the entire group. Than grow it by doing this:

A suggestion, create a referral program, it is referral week:
1. Segregate the list into groups.
2. E-mail only twice a month with more precise content.
3. Personalize as much as possible
4. Ask for referrals(forward e-mails) and if your friend signs up???
5. Become a guest writer on another's e-mail. Leave them write on yours. Each of you, of course would get a link to that persons. Ask for a signup to yours inside the post.
6. People that have customer traffic, create an offer to acquire their e-mail, especially at point of sale or a computer that could print a coupon.
7. Get and post testimonials about your newsletter, everywhere.

If they want to create a better list, make a better offer to get the name or better yet content that someone wants to read. If you want to grow your list do it from within not by trying to acquire more.

And then to start blogging.

Technorati Tags: E-zine,Email,E-mail marketing,Referral,Referral week,Referral Marketing

No blog? Then you need a Google profile

Great advice from from Web Ink Now, and written by David Meerman Scott.

One of the currencies of social media is that when you participate, people find out who you are.

For example, when you leave a comment on someone else's blog post, you can link to your profile on the Web. All the blogging tools have a place where you can leave a virtual calling card – your own web URL where people who read your comment (especially the blogger him or herself) can find out who you are and perhaps contact you.

Most people link to their blog in that comment field.

However, most people don't have a blog. What the heck do you do then?

I've found an alternative solution that works very well.

Create a public Google profile for yourself and then use that as the URL that you point people to. You can have a photo, a bio, and contact details. It’s really cool and it is free.

Here is the URL where you sign up.

Here is what my profile looks like.

Once you've got a public profile, use it as your virtual calling card all over the Web. Just one example - link to it from your Amazon review page so the authors of the books you review can see who you are.

This is from Web Ink Now, and written by David Meerman Scott.

The Businesscardless Office

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

The Businesscardless Office

Seemslike we’ve heard about the promise of the paperless office for about 10 years now, but in some circles of business, we’re not much closer to the reality of this than we were back then.

I think a couple things have slowed the crawl to this 1) people just don’t do a good enough job using the vast array of file saving, file sharing, and digital collaboration tools out there with ready access on mobile and portable devices. If you think about it, we don’t need much paper. 2) there’s still a desire for something tangible that only a physical document or magazine can bring. You can’t touch or smell digital documents so that makes them less real. I think this human need will make the creation of physical products, marketing kits and magazines a necessary part of the marketing world for some time.

Andhere’s the ultra cool thing - anytime someone that’s given you their contact info via dub makes a change, it’s automatically updated on your phone.

You can also create DUBIDs for products and services and allow anyone to request to have more information sent to their phone just by sending a text to the DUBID you create.

There are any number of ways to use this tool, and like other innovative technologies, its usefulness will grow with adoption, but DUB already syncs contacts and updates with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Siebel On-Demand and SugarCRM and says it has Facebook and LinkedIn integration in the works,

Telling Stories

This is from Web Ink Now, and written by David Meerman Scott. I encourage you to read the entire story, A short excerpt:

For decades, traditional business-school-style marketing has stressed the "Marketing Ps" (Typically the four Ps are identified as Product, Pricing, Promotion, and Placement, although some say there are five or six Ps including others like Packaging and Publicity).

Anyway, if youre focused on the marketing Ps (choose any four), you're likely not marketing very well, because you're not telling stories.

This "Marketing P" approach is doomed to fail on the Web. Why? Because nobody cares about your products and services. Mumbo-jumbo about your products won't appeal to your buyers, because they simply don't care about you, your company, and what you do.

Success comes from the fact that people want to share stories with their friends, colleagues, and family members.

Telling Stories is an important part of the Duct Tape Marketing Catalyst program, take a look.

Adding Social Features to Your Web Site

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Adding Social Features to Your Web Site

Theweb has become a terribly social place and that raises the expectation of most web site visitors. The ability to add content, comment, rate, review, interact and share information found when surfing the web has become standard fare.

byadding a few simple scripts and widgets you can easily add tremendous social functionality to any web page or blog. Giving your visitors, prospects and customers ways to share and amplify their voice is a great way to enhance their experience of your business online.

JSKits

- This is one of the dead simple easiest ways to add rating, navigation, polling, chat, reviewing and commenting to any web page. You simply copy a line of code and you are in business. Getting customer reviews and reader comments on web page, usually a blog function is great for static product pages.

Social Ad Units - Popular Media recently introduced something they call Influencer Ads. These banner ad type units allow you to place ads that contain an entire social media follow-up system. When someone clicks on an ad for your webinar, they can automatically post it to Facebook or send it to a friend with personalized follow-up. This is a great tool for contests and registration incentive campaigns. (You can see this in action here)

Meebo Me - This simple IM widget can be embedded on your site to allow visitors to initiate an IM chat instantly when they visit your site. This can be a great way to add customer feedback, help and interaction functionality.

Add to Any - These widget allows visitors to easily subscribe to RSS content, share, bookmark or email content using many of the commonly used services.

This is from Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing, and written by John Jantsch.

Content Marketing Secrets from The Ritz Carlton

These guys are just all over my radar screen lately. Read the rest of this post from Content Marketing Today, and written by Newt Barrett

Supurb In Person Content Marketing: Continuous process improvement enables great people to function in an optimal way. For example, the ability to promise immaculately clean rooms in which everything works is the result of processes that have been established for that express purpose. The successful operation of each hotel property is the end result determining how to optimize each critical process that leads to a wonderful guest experience. Done right, optimum results are achieved with great efficiency of effort.

In Person Content Marketing Lessons You Can Apply to Your Business

1. You need to put the right people in the right positions. For example, at Conditioned Air in Naples, FL, they work very hard to make sure that those individuals who work closely with customers truly enjoy and thrive from regular customer interaction.
2. Developand keep improving processes that make it easy for your team to succeed. Don’t let a lack of process or bad processes make it hard for them to keep your customers happy.
3. Happyemployees who, in turn, makes customers happy will motivate your customers to sell your products for you by sharing their positive experiences. Since so much of that sharing now winds up on the web, the world will soon know how wonderful your company is–or isn’t.

My other post about Content Marketing

 

Technorati Tags: ritz-carlton, marketing,in-person content marketing,customer service,quality,process improvement,

How To Create A Content Marketing Strategy

If you haven't heard the term "content marketing" - you soon will. Authors of Get Content. Get Customers.) talked all about using content to impact your bottom line. To give you a taste of what we'll talk about, here is my quick checklist of the questions you should ask yourself as you start to build your own content marketing strategy:

1. What is the problem you will try to solve? Great content marketing focuses on answering a key challenge or question that relates to your business.
2. Howcan you make it about more than you? This is not a sales pitch. It needs to be useful and offer more context beyond just how great your product/service is.
3. Who'sgoing to care to read and share it? It needs to be interesting, but the sharing is particularly important, as great content marketing should be something people can't help sharing.
4. What'sthe best platform and format to use? Think about video versus blogging versus downloadable PDFs and what will be easiest for your audience.
5. Howwill you promote it? Plan to spend quite a bit of time thinking about how people will find your content, as it is completely useless if no one can locate it.
6. Howwill you know if it's working? Your metric for success may be directly tied to sales, or awareness, or consideration. Whatever it is, know before you start how you'll tell if it was successful.

And just in case you can't make it, there will be a full archive available from our host Elizabeth Marshall at http://www.authorteleseminars.com.

This is from Influential Marketing, and written by Rohit.

Review some of my posts on Business901 in Social Media for more information.

Amazon is beatable

I tried this week to beat Amazon on the Duct Tape Marketing search term. I finally did it in the ninth inning, Friday at 4:00 PM. I checked it before shutting my computer down. It was a challenge to me and actually I was just having fun with my site to prove a point. It is all about content and doing some things correctly with SEO but certainly not laboring to much on the point. So, I made it, would you like to find out how?

Technorati Tags: Duct Tape Marketing,SEO,Amazon

Republishing with RSS

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing, I encourage you to read the entire post:

Republishing with RSS

It’sbeen far too long since I’ve allowed my geeky passion for RSS to spill forth.

As a reminder, let me say again - anything that throws off an RSS feed (oh, and that’s just about any online tool) presents some interesting republishing opportunities.

There publishing of RSS feeds for you own content creation purposes involves two steps 1) locate or generate the RSS feed, 2) produce the code to publish the feed as HTML somewhere.

Some example of RSS producers - blogs, online calenders, blog categories, and custom searches for starters.

This is from Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing, and written by John Jantsch.

Social Media Hierarchy Revisited

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Social Media Hierarchy Revisted

Awhile back I wrote a post that outlined what I called the hierarchy of social media. In that post I compared the tools commonly employed in social media to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. The primary notion being that certain tools were more suited to someone just getting started, meeting basic needs, than someone deeply evolved and more suited to more advanced needs.

So my new hierarchy or pyramid has evolved to this

Plan,listen, join and grow!

Managing from TwistImage

 Good Suggestions from Mitch Joel:

Why is it that most businesses are fine with either keeping things just as they are or cutting back on what they had planned to do?

Not a day goes by that we don’t see one of the many major companies out there releasing their numbers, and then proclaiming that they are either going to stay the course? or reduce their marketing and overall spending. How do you get ahead and increase revenues if all you’re doing is cutting?

Other Topics in post:

This might be the perfect opportunity to think a little differently.

Do it while everyone has their heads in the sand or are covering their eyes.

“The time to buy is when the blood is running in the streets.�?

These digital tools do make a difference.