Hi everyone. It’s Jonathan Goodman. Welcome to another episode of The World of Internet Marketing. It’s great to have you with us. Today’s episode is titled “Money for Marketing.” But first the news.
Social Media
A recent study found that although Facebook hashtag usage increased by 20% in June, companies reported no real increase in engagement. The study done by analytics firm Simply Measured found that visual posts (photos or videos) had the highest levels of engagements for brands. The study also found that the sweet spot for length of a post is somewhere between 50 and 250 characters with engagement dropping off significantly for posts with less than 50 or more than 250 characters. Fifty percent of the top brands for engagement were the automotive industry, but also included companies such as Disney and Starbucks.
Social media has grown with Fortune 500 companies; 77% are tweeting and 70% are on Facebook. An annual report from Massachusetts Dartmouth evaluating the social media activity of Fortune Magazine’s Fortune 500 list found that 34 percent of this year’s Fortune 500 companies are now actively blogging, 77 percent maintain active Twitter accounts, 70 percent have Facebook pages and 69 percent have YouTube accounts. The number of Twitter and Facebook accounts for Fortune 500 companies both increased by 4 percent with the company blogs increasing 6 percent. The company with the most Twitter followers and Facebook fans is actually a new addition to the list, Facebook itself. Forty-five of the companies on the list also boast a Pinterest page.
Your Sematic Minute
Negobot is an Internet robotic agent which was developed recently to help catch sexual predators. Negobot, created by a Spanish scientist, appears to be a 14-year-old girl, whose identity shifts according to what the conversation of the user is seeking. Negobot alerts the authorities after a certain amount of time, but the predator is unaware of the true identity of their chat partner. It is made by Dr. Carlos Laorden, 28, a researcher at Spain’s University of Deusto, and his team. They have created the world’s first cyberware designed to engage, identify and collect data on would-be pedophiles.
Image by Yandex via CrunchBase
Tragically sad news is coming out of Russia. The Yandex co-founder, Ilya Segalovich, has died. The founder of Russia’s leading search engine has died at the age of 48. Segalovich most recently served as its chief technology officer and had been responding well to cancer, but he unfortunately passed away. Segalovich also helped establish the National Corpus of Russian Language and the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar, which helped to improve communication between researchers and developers working in the realm of information retrieval.
I know that I had recently said this podcast was going to focus more on Yandex and we certainly will. That’s why I wanted to let everybody know of his passing. Terribly tragic news.
Hacker News
Five people have been charged with taking part in a computer hacking conspiracy. They’re being charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. This is all happening in the United States. Four Russians and one Ukrainian are involved in this from across the globe. What they did was install sniffers to detect information from tens of thousands of credit cards. After retrieving the information, the group then sold it to resellers, who sold it to online forums and groups.
Now if you listen to this podcast a lot you know that I talk about hacking all the time. I find it fascinating, both good and bad hacking. One of the best books that I’ve ever read is Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground. It’s written by Kevin Poulsen and it’s just a fascinating read. That one actually specifically focuses on credit card cybercrime where they steal numbers of accounts and they duplicate credit cards and go out and spend it until that’s all used up and they keep moving on. It’s amazing how they caught this guy and it’s really an exciting read.
The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users’ stored passwords. Now this is news that just came out this morning and it’s still so fresh that it’s kind of unverified, but supposedly some of the government orders demand not only a user’s password but also the encryption algorithm. Both Goggle and Microsoft wouldn’t say if they have received such requests and stated they have never turned over a user’s encrypted passwords. Yahoo also would not say whether the company had received such requests but said if they do receive them from law enforcement, they deny such requests on the grounds that they would allow overly broad access to users’ private information. If they are required to provide information, they do so only in the strictest interpretation of what is required by law.
Now out of all of those companies, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, I tend to believe Yahoo the most because at least they’re saying, well, if asked, we do have to go by the letter of the law, but we have a team of legal experts that are able to push back and only give a small amount of data. Unfortunately, if that data truly is a user’s name and password, it’s amazing to me – and Congress just passed the approval of the NSA continuing to do what it wants to do –this isn’t a question of are you being tracked by the NSA and you don’t have to worry because you didn’t do anything wrong, the question really is should Americans legally be tracked by the NSA, who doesn’t really have the ability to do that. It’s not a question of who is being tracked. If everyone is being tracked and we’re all being treated like criminals, this is a terribly slippery slope that we’ve wound up on.
A Japanese poker champion is charged with distributing Android malware. One of the nine men recently arrested for sending spam emails with Android malware included Japanese poker champion Masaaki Kagawa. The emails maliciously collected information from contacts stored on the device. The group was able to hack 810,000 Android devices and collected about 37 million addresses. Their offices were raided by authorities in April 2013.
App Highlight
I wanted to focus on two – really almost three – very unique apps that are out there for your marketing abilities. The Main Event is going to talk about marketing, so I wanted to kind of start off with my App Highlight. We’re going to talk about three: Rapportive, Boomerang and setting your Gmail to allow for canned responses. Now Rapportive is kind of screwy because somehow if you go into Chrome Web store and you do a search for Rapportive, it doesn’t actually come up. If you do a search in Google for Rapportive and you click through to that web site, it says that the file is corrupted. However, if you do a search for Rapportive Chrome store, that brings you to the Rapportive page. I think it’s great.
Now I’ll tell you a little bit about what it is. It’s about making email a better place. Very simply, if you’re on Gmail and you’re writing to someone, let’s say for the first or second time. Let’s say you’re writing to Anderson Cooper and you know his email address. Well if you put his email address into the “To” line within the email, on the side of Gmail, all the email will move over once Rapportive is installed. And on the right-hand side, it will bring in Anderson Cooper’s name, an image of him, the correct email address corresponding to what you put in, where he is located, and it will show a direct connection to LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype. You can really get an amazing amount of information out of this one tool.
Yes, it is slightly stalkerish because you’re gaining more information than the person you’re having the conversation with thinks that you have, but it’s really just a question of doing a search, right? I mean, if you wanted to do a search on a specific person’s LinkedIn account to find out where it is, you could do that. You have the person’s email, so if you wanted to connect with them, LinkedIn just asks you for the email to connect to them with. So this is just an easier process. It’s not really a stalking tool, but it is very quick and easy.
What’s very nice is that if you’re talking to somebody who you’ve never met face-to-face and they have an image available, you’re going to be able to see that. And that’s really great. That’s one tool that I use. Obviously, I’m using Chrome so it’s installed into Chrome. It’s an add-on feature for Chrome and so is this other one, which is Boomerang. Boomerang allows you to schedule messages to be sent or returned at a later date. It’s a very cool tool. It’s about $149 to go pro for the year.
I personally think it’s worth it. I’m certainly not promoting them in any way. We’re just talking about apps that I use, but I think that this is a great tool for any of my users out there who own a small business and are trying gain some way of communicating back with potential clients. What boomerang does is allow you to schedule. Let’s say that I’m working Saturday and Sunday and I’m writing emails, but I know that nobody is going to look at them until Monday. Well, I can actually schedule that email to go out Monday morning at 8:00 or 9:00 depending on whether they’re on the east coast or west coast. I can also schedule to send that email to them again if they don’t respond to that email.
I was talking to somebody recently about how they market and they really told me some fascinating things. They have a 2-week constant touch, but the email is written in such a way that you think it’s written on the fly. They basically set up these “Hi, how are you doing. I just wanted to keep in touch” emails and then schedule them to go out, although they use a different scheduling service. It does take a little bit of time because you do have to get in there and schedule everything, but it does allow you to set it once and you’re done.
So if I have somebody I’m trying to bring on as a client and they’re hesitant to sign and I need to do more than seven contacts. The way we do it here is we speak to somebody, we send out a postcard, we send out an email, we contact them again, we send out another email. They’re all advertising emails, right? They’re very kind of sales-oriented. Then we send out another postcard. It takes a lot to get somebody on board and ready to go with your company. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling $2 VM ware or software or if you’re selling a million dollar house. You have to constantly be in connection with them.
You can use Boomerang to set those advertising emails that are going to go out. You can set them for 2 weeks and 4 weeks and you set them for the right time. But now that I’ve spoken to this individual, I’m realizing that I can set up these kind of nondescript personal communications that go out every 2 weeks. All I have to do is sit down and write out 25 of these kind of “Hello. How are you doing” emails and then set them up through Boomerang. So I think it’s a really great tool. Email marketing, aside from the cost of Boomerang and some of these other applications, when you compare it to postage or in-person, is so cheap to just say, “hi, how are you doing. Have you given any thought to the proposal?” Just to constantly stay in contact with them.
The final one that I wanted to talk about is in Gmail you can go into Settings > Lab and do a search for canned responses. It’s written by Chad P. You can do a search and it comes up canned responses. So add that into your Gmail and now you can put your advertising emails into canned responses and a new potential client comes on-board. All I do is go into my canned responses and set this up every 2 weeks. I’ve got it and I pull it in and it’s done. So the combination of canned responses with Boomerang and then having Rapportive there really makes it so much easier for me to market my company and for my salespeople out there to market all of what we’re doing.
The Main Event
The Main Event for this week is Money for Marketing. You know, I have an MBA and we always talk in marketing about the 1% to 2% return. So if I try to talk to 100 potential clients, I will hopefully if I’m doing it right get one or two new clients. So it’s a lot of effort that goes into reaching out and grabbing a new client. As I’ve said before, sometimes it takes years before these clients actually convert. But so often I hear when talking to new start-ups the idea that only a small portion of the money that is coming in goes back into marketing.
I would say to you that unless you’re pulling a nice figure salary, you have a staff who is working for you, you’re paying the mortgage, paying your car, paying yourself a salary, going on vacation and then you have another $100,000 or another million coming in, then yes in that case you want a percentage of those profits to be earmarked for marketing. However, I think that this message gets so jumbled up when academics or people who are already successful in their field are talking to small businesses and they’re saying, oh, you only want to put 10 percent of the incoming money into marketing.
They hear that and they’re only making $20,000 because it’s the first year of their start-up and they’re really not that successful yet, they’re saying, okay, I’m going to put $2,000 into marketing. And that’s absolutely incorrect. I really have to take a very firm stand here and talk about if you’re a small business and you’re scraping by, I understand that you have to pay the mortgage and the bills and the employees if you have employees, but after that point, 100% of profits have to go into marketing. It’s critical because now if the business is making $100,000 and you’re pulling out $40,000 and you’ve got an employee at $20,000 – I’m just throwing these numbers out there – and then you’ve got $40,000 sitting in the bank and you think you should use 10% of it for marketing, you’re still struggling.
Your employees are still struggling or they’re new or they’re just out of college. And instead you need to be pouring all $40,000 of that profit, 100% of that profit, into marketing. You need to grow your business. That’s the main focus of what I want to talk about today because I think small businesses get that wrong. I mean, yes, you’re pulling yourself up by the seat of your pants and you’re making ends meet, but after that point, the marketing dollars are critical because there’s a huge difference between putting $4,000 into marketing and putting $40,000 into marketing. And when we’re talking about 1% and 2% returns, $4,000 isn’t going to get you anywhere near where you need to be.
Putting $40,000 into marketing will finally result in hopefully if you’re doing marketing right…..and you probably only have one or two things to choose from with $4,000, whereas $40,000 allows you to choose from a multitude of things, so $40,000 allows you to try a variety of things. Some things aren’t going to work as far as marketing. Some things are going to work very well. But you won’t know it until you do it. If you’re doing just the one or two things with your $4,000 and they completely fail, the following year you’ve used up your marketing budget and you’re not going to see anything from it.
Rant of the Week
Now I’m all fired up, so we can do the Rant of the Week. I had a very interesting dialogue with an old friend of mine on Facebook this week. Unfortunately, it was centered around the George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin case and all of that. I told his audience who was reading the dialogue and reading the conversation that I was going talk about it. Honestly, I’m not going to talk about it. I think that it’s a tragedy on both ends. It’s a tragedy for that kid. It’s a tragedy for George Zimmerman. A life has been taken. What I want to do in this Rant of the Week is talk about the “stand your ground” statistics.
I did a little bit of research and I think the information is critical to what we’re talking about in the overall communication that we have as a nation. I found a very interesting article in the Tampa Bay Times. What the article did basically was highlight certain cases, the magnitude, the types of the people and the numbers of cases that are coming through Florida law on “stand your ground.” I’m talking specifically about “stand your ground” as it pertains to Florida.
The reason I say this – I lived in Florida, so I can say this – is there’s something very strange about Florida. And the only thing I can point to is that maybe because it’s so darn hot there that people’s brains just sizzle. I have family in Florida and my mother is moving down there, but I’ve lived there and I’ve seen the craziness. It’s craziness that we don’t see in the Northeast, and it’s very difficult to explain it to somebody who only goes to Florida for Disney World or Universal and doesn’t really live there for an extended period of time to see what’s going on. So I think it’s a chemical reaction where you have a crazy state – and I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of emails about that – and a crazy law. The combination of the two is killing people.
I’m just going to read you the three bits of this news article that I found the most disturbing. First nearly 70 percent of those who invoke the “stand your ground” law to avoid criminal prosecution have gone free. Defendants claiming “stand your ground” are more likely to prevail if the victim is black; 73 percent of those who killed a black person faced no penalty compared to 59 percent of those who killed a white person. In nearly one-third of the cases analyzed, it was the defendant who initiated the fight, shot an unarmed person or pursued their victim, killed them and still went free.
Hands down, just statistically this is a terrible, terrible law. This law is being bent to accommodate things that the legislatures never thought that they would, but of course that is always the case. And it’s just become this amazing focus. The nation is once again focused like a microscope on what is going on in Florida. We get this every four years with the presidential election. And now again, we really all need to turn our eyes and focus in on what is going on because that is a legislature that allowed that law to pass and now with the statistical proof that it is a disaster.
I originally condemned the idea that the president got in front of the podium and took a local issue that had unfortunately been blown out of proportion and turned it into a national issue blasted in the media 24/7. But for him to take that stand, he’s the president and he needs to be dealing with your safety as a nation. So I was unhappy with the fact that he did that. But now, looking at these statistics – and he probably has even more knowledge about what’s really going on because he has an analysis far better than what I’m able to do in a couple of minutes of reading an article – there’s obviously a problem here. There’s something going on down in Florida with this law that’s allowing people to buy a gun and kill people and throw up their hands and say it’s self-defense/stand your ground. What a dangerous state. Really crazy.
Again, this is Jonathan Goodman. You can follow me @HalyardConsult on Twitter. New episodes of The World of Internet Marketing can be heard every Friday. You can access the archives of my previous shows on Spreaker.com – user name Jonathan Goodman. The podcast is also available with transcription at halyardconsulting.com and geekcast.fm one week after the episode airs. I’ll be speaking at Affiliate Summit East on August 18-20 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA and also PubCon Las Vegas on October 21-25 at the Las Vegas Convention Center South Halls. Thank you all for listening to another episode of The World of Internet Marketing. Don’t forget to pick up my book The World of Internet Marketing on Amazon and if you like this podcast please share it with your network of friends and family.
The post Money for Marketing appeared first on GeekCast.fm.