Non marketers speak

A couple quotes from different folks, who aren’t actually in marketing, but have insightful comments on marketing.

Anyway, remember: outsource your marketing, outsource your reputation and ethics. Popehat

And 2 posts from a favorite author about self promotion by authors. Her first post is about having other authors excessively promote themselves.

There is a difference between promotion in our own spaces and promotion in the spaces of others. One is appropriate and necessary. The other is a very fine line, and stepping over it can result in lost readers and hurt sensibilities, and that’s never a good thing. Adventures in Self-Promotion.

The second is a list of 10 things authors should remember when promoting themselves. As the only woman to be nominated in 4 separate Hugo award categories, I think her thoughts on author promotion are well worth reading. So are her books (as Seanan, as Mira), by the way.

Outlook.com in practice
Spam makes only 200MM dollars a year

Related Posts

Relevant and timely marketing

What better time to advertise pizza specials than at 2:30 pm on a Friday afternoon?
Either my local pizza joint is doing sophisticated tracking (hrmmm… these people often order pizza on the weekend, email on Friday) or I’m just smack dab in the middle of their average demographic.
In either case, advertising pizza on a Friday afternoon strikes me as the epitome of timely, relevant marketing.
Pizza for dinner, anyone?

Read More

Crowdsourced Investing and Spam

Kickstarter’s success has made a lot of people pay attention to the concept of crowdfunding. At it’s best, crowdfunding investment allows fans of an artist to send her money to directly support her work, and get something special out of it. At it’s worst, it’s photoshopped fake products, dubious consumer electronics and videogame projects from the implausible to outright scams.
Crowdfunding sites provide a fairly simple service: they allow people to list products on their website, provide a discussion forum and allow people interested in the project to pay money (after the crowdfunding site skims 5-10% off the top) to the project backers. The project backers promise something in return for the payment – from one or more of the actual product being developed, if it’s every released, down to a simple “thanks!’ on a website. That’s something that makes perfect sense in the original KickStarter artist fan-club world, but also allows attempts to fund tech startups to avoid SEC requirements on both the startup and the crowdfunding company. Those SEC requirements were put in place many years ago to make it more difficult for scam-artists to swindle people in the guise of investing in a worthless company…
What does this have to do with spam? Well, if you’re going to set up a spam campaign of some sort – whether it’s for a real product, or an outright scam – there are several things that are very useful to have: A website that looks plausible, and won’t be taken down by the webhost. A way to accept money, ideally via online credit card payments. And a way to control discussion about your product, so that you can maintain an appearance of legitimacy and build buzz, while keeping naysayers from dissuading potential customers would be perfect.
That’s exactly what the crowdfunding sites offer. Some of them – KickStarter, for one – are very aware of the potential for abuse. Not only do they do some basic checks potential projects for legitimacy, but they have – and enforce – acceptable use policies to deter bad behaviour. Others, like IndieGoGo, don’t.
I got this spam out of the blue:

Read More

Delivery and marketing part 2

A while ago I wrote some thoughts about the conflicting requirements of delivery and marketing. I posted something similar over on the Only Influencers list, too. My thoughts generated a very interesting discussion, one that helped me clarify some of my somewhat random thoughts from earlier.
Marketing is about finding mindshare. One way you get mindshare is repetition. But people tune out repetition pretty quickly. Sending the same offers, the same copy over and over again means recipients start to tune things out.  When recipients start tuning out mail, they may not bother opening it, they just read the subject line.  If too many recipients start relying on the subject line then delivery can suffer.
Effective marketing relies on getting mail in front of the target audience. That’s the delivery component. Without inbox delivery, even the best marketing will not work.
No one will see marketing if it is in the spamfolder.
I don’t think you can cleanly separate delivery strategy from marketing strategy, but it’s important to realize they have different constraints and different pressures. When I talk about delivery with a client, I’m talking about getting mail into the inbox. And, most of the time, they’ve come to me because they’re not getting into the inbox and they have to make changes. The genius of their marketing is irrelevant, because no customers see it.
But once mail is in the inbox you can’t just ignore delivery, either. Sure, it becomes less of a pressure on the copy and the marketing strategy, until such time as the mail isn’t getting into the inbox any longer. Then it’s back to working on delivery and maybe having to implement some aggressive data hygiene. Back in the inbox and you can be aggressive on the marketing again.
Successful email marketing requires balancing the constraints of good delivery against the constraints of good marketing.

Read More