I’m rolling out an auto-DM campaign!

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Oct 24, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Twitter | 20 comments

Consider this your fair warning: I’m rolling out an auto-DM campaign to my Twitter followers.

/waits out the inevitable fit of rage

You’re probably wondering why. I’m testing a belief that many people on Twitter would engage more, would get more value, would be happier followers, if they actually saw half of what I published on Twitter. I suspect that people miss just about everything because it’s very noisy. My audience consists of many folks who are marketing professionals. They in turn follow and subscribe to lots of people, which means that even blocks of updates like #the5 are gone within minutes of them logging into Twitter, so they miss the good stuff.

I firmly believe that things like newsletters are the antidote to this. Newsletters are a better archive than hitting the favorites button, they’re a more lasting archive, and they’re a more convenient archive that’s portable and self-contained.

Here’s the campaign details and how I’ve set it up to work. Everyone following me should get one and only one auto-DM. Each day, my TweetAdder software will send the maximum allowed number of daily DMs (250) out to everyone who is following me with this tweet:

Thanks for following. May I please ask you to subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss useful marketing news? http://bit.ly/twadm

It will get you to this Twitter landing page, which I just wrote. If you inspect the URL in the tweet closely, you’ll find that it contains a referrer field that will flow into my CRM, which will give me an idea of what percentage of the 43,000+ people following me have decided the DM was of enough value to subscribe. Of course, it also contains the usual Google Analytics tracking codes too.

Naturally, I’ll be able to track analytics as well, following down the chain of actions:

• How many DMs did I send?
• How many were clicked on? (bit.ly data and GA data)
• How many “converted”? (newsletter subscriber data)

For those who do subscribe and fill out the form completely, I’ll also be able to cross reference Twitter handles and when you started following me; this should give me an idea whether newer followers are more interested in engaging in this way than older followers.

Stay tuned in! I will publish semi-regular updates about the experiment, which according to my math, should conclude in 175 days or roughly on April 16, 2012. At or after that time, I’ll share some rollup statistics on how it went. If you’re a data junkie who likes to crunch this sort of information, please check back in around mid-April and I’ll gladly share an anonymized data set with you if I can.

As I said at the beginning of the post, consider this your fair warning. If getting a single auto-DM really, really upsets you (and it honestly does to some people), please take a few moments to unfollow me now. I won’t be offended, since that’s effectively the equivalent of opting out. I’ll tweet out this post, too. However, if you miss the tweet, you definitely prove the point that the auto-DM campaign is trying to make, yes?

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The Little Things Bring the Good Life

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Oct 21, 2011 in Awakening | 2 comments

• When your bed at home is more comfortable than any hotel’s…
• When you look forward more to your kitchen’s creations than a restaurant’s…
• When you’re more eager for vacation to end so you can get back to regular life than you are for regular life to end so you can vacation…

… you are living the good life.

And if you’re not living that life right now, look around to see what resources you can move around to help you get there. Think about it for a minute. Is it wiser to spend $500 on a vacation that will last a few days, or spend $500 on an incredibly comfortable mattress that you’ll spend 6-8 hours a day on for the next few years? Is it wiser to spend $50 on dinner out or $50 on the freshest, best quality ingredients you can find and make something even better at home – and likely have leftovers to spare?

This works professionally, too. Are you better off spending $2500 to attend a conference or to upgrade your computer and monitor? One will last a few days and might have some professional benefits, but the other you might be sitting in front of for 8-12 hours a day, and the faster and more capable it is, the faster and more capable you are. Are you better off spending $500 on a new logo or faster Internet access for a year? One will have intangible benefits, to be sure, but the other will make every online interaction more productive.

Here’s the last word on this: the more that you can make your everyday life a bit better, a bit more comfortable, a bit more relaxing, the more that your everyday life will support your quest for increased prosperity and happiness. Little things matter! Every day in your normal life puts you a little closer or farther away from your goals in life. If your daily surroundings are working against you, making you less relaxed, less focused, less productive, then your goals will simply drift out of your grasp. If your daily surroundings recharge you, focus you, take away unnecessary discomfort, and let you unleash more of your potential, then your goals will suddenly seem a lot more achievable.

Are you living the good life?

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I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

How to set up a Google Analytics dashboard

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Oct 20, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics | 2 comments

Want to save yourself a ton of time each day and get your basic reporting stats in one location? Try setting up a Google Analytics dashboard. You must be using the newest version of Google Analytics to do this; check by looking at the top right of your screen to see whether you’re on the old version or new version.

To begin, pick 3 metrics that you care most about. For the average site manager, chances are these are going to be:

• Where did people come from?
• What did they like?
• How many of them converted to help me achieve my goals?

Start on your home tab, choose Dashboards, and select New Dashboard. (GA comes with a default one that isn’t super-helpful)

You’ll be asked to start a blank canvas and name it. Next, your first widget will appear for configuration. Let’s follow the standard metrics above. Our first widget will be a metric. Choose metric from the top, then choose Unique Visitors.

Next, add another widget. This time, choose a pie chart, choose Unique Visitors by Source.

Add yet another widget. This time, choose a table, then set it to Page by Unique Visitors by Goal Conversion Rate.

Two final widgets. This time, choose Timeline by Unique Visitors and Goal Completions.

Then add the metric of Goal Completions.

Drag the boxes around to make them look nice and voila!

You’ve got yourself a nice dashboard that lets you quickly see how your site is doing on any given time period in a tight, compact fashion that doesn’t require you to jump around to all of the different reports in Google Analytics. It neatly answers “where did they come from, what did they like, what did they do” in one page. On top of that, this is a great summary report to give to executives and other folks who are busy and just want a general overview of what’s happening.

Obviously, you can add tons of additional widgets and data points to best suit your needs, but remember that the point of a dashboard is to give you a very fast look at things and focus only on the most important pieces of data. Avoid cluttering it up at all costs.

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Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

Frameworks: a place to hang your hat

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Oct 19, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing | 2 comments

One of the topics that’s come up repeatedly in the last couple of days is a misunderstanding of the role of frameworks. You might call them theories or models or concepts, but they’re mostly the same thing: a place to hang your hat, a starting point. A great many people tend to look down on academic models like SWOT, 4P, BCG Growth Matrix, as being useless, antiquated, ivory tower theory with no real world basis. While it’s true that the world changes very rapidly, these frameworks exist to help us solve marketing problems by giving us a place to start.

See if this sounds familiar: sales are down, traffic is down, and the business is struggling. You as a marketer are brought in to help turn things around, and people look to you as some sort of magician, able to wave a magic wand and bring customers through the door. Where do you start? Do you just start throwing things against the wall and hope something sticks before the company goes out of business?

This is where using the basics comes in handy. Take any of the frameworks you have access to and start matching up the metrics (and the deficiencies) against those frameworks to illuminate where the company is weakest, where the processes are most broken, especially the ones that you have control over. Maybe you start with a basic marketing funnel and map out all of the stages in it, noticing that the gap between lead and customer is especially large. Aha! You’ve found where you need to start. Or maybe you pull out a Growth Matrix, map out the company’s product lines, and realize you’re marketing and investing most heavily in the dogs and not the stars. You now know what you need to change.

Frameworks and academic models aren’t intended to be cookie-cutter solutions or “just add water” recipes. They’re starting points, places for you to hang data, so that you can start to solve the problems your business is facing. If you choose to not learn them, or worse, dismiss them as being useless theory, you will likely find yourself struggling to solve many of your marketing problems, reinventing the wheel every day until your competitors drive you out of business.

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Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

Beyond the Toolbox

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Oct 18, 2011 in Advertising, Conferences, Marketing, Social media, Strategy | 0 comments

This morning I had the pleasure of keynoting the University of Toledo’s Internet Marketing Conference. Here’s what we talked about:

My thanks go to Dr. Iryna Pentina and the entire UoT staff for having me be a part of a fantastic event! Stay tuned to the UoT website as they may be posting video from the event in the future.

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Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.