The Email Wars

This year was a special year for the eROI team. Instead of SIX people we sent FIFTEEN of the team representing all of the specialized groups to the SXSW Interactive event in Austin, Texas. Five Days, 15 people, 1000s of ideas, and 30 helpings of Ribs.

With this many people passionate about everything digital but with different views and agendas for SXSW, we decided that we would be able to cover more of the event, panels and sessions (as well as parties) by setting out to follow our own individual plans and paths to learning. The sum of the collective is more powerful than that of the individual right? The plan was for all of us to recap lessons and new ideas learned whether we could find usable ways to employ them in our projects or lives or not. By covering more we could ingest more. There was an implied “ROI” in the whole growth of the attendee plan and we would share our knowledge with the entire team when we returned.

But why stop just at our team, why not share it all with you? If you read our other blogs (notice them in the top header of this blog) you will find that everyone is openly recapping sessions, conversation and ideas that they brought back with them.

Here is what we learned from the event:

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I just got back from SXSW last week and took a lot away. I am planning on typing up and sharing the things with those of you that might benefit from the ideas shared there.

But in leaving Austin and looking at the world from afar it seems that everyone now believes themselves to be a social media strategist. Just take some time to look at community profiles, blogs, twitter bios, etc and you will see that every marketer that exists wants to add the title to their bio. Why? Well is it hot and everyone wants to jump on the band wagon to find the money that is quickly leaving the budgets of other mediums.

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Well it is that time of year again. No not the setting of the clocks forward. No not the return to spring. No not the time that we clean up our lists and break up with those that are not participating in our email programs…

But the time is upon us to return to South By Southwest in Austin TX. And I am giddy like a school girl the night before the first day of Jr. High. This year eROI is returning not to speak, not to exhibit but to participate in SXSWi. And we are not going into this Spring Break for geeks and marketers lightly. We are taking an army of 15 people from the company to soak up every morsel of noughuty goodness that we can bring back to share the execute some amazing campaigns for our clients.

If you have not ever been to this event it should be on your “fight with every ounce of your corporate travel budget” list to attend. The amount of openness, knowledge sharing, connecting and of course celebrating is enormous. Each time we return we seem to spend the next 11 months planning on how to get back.

So if you happen to be going, come find us. Follow us on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/eROI) to see where we are at. OR you can meet us at a client party (RSVP soon) on Saturday night where they will introduce a new killer app coming to the web this summer. Just in time for all of us to benefit from it.

RSVP at http://moonitdoesroux-invitefriends.eventbrite.com/

Not sure we will be blogging from the event, but for sure we will be tweeting away.

A recent experiment that was FORCED on me the past weeks while at SXSW and OMMA West was not having the ability to send email – from either the wifi at SXSW (I started this article there) or at my hotel via wifi or ethernet. Then at OMMA in Hollywood same issue again, plus while trying to tweak my configuration with other ports (yes total geek speak here), I killed my ability to receive email. I was blind! Unable to use my trusted inbox while on the road, what was I to do? Could I survive? Would someone send a search party to pull me out of this situation and see if I still had a pulse?

So what happened when email was turned one way to the inbox? Well it changed the dynamic. I became a listener and not a participant. How was that you ask, as I am never one to be quiet. It was different. Not complete hell, but close. It drove me to thumb bending feats of danger across the city of Austin, the airports of Denver and LA, and the city of Hollywood. I was a corporate road warrior and I had no inbox pillow to rest my head.

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About your personal brand in social media.

Interesting that the whole panel started with asking everyone to submit questions to the panel via twitter. What an interesting way to bring in the audience prior to starting your panel. Love it, but then I am a Twitter maniac, as was EVERYONE at SXSW.

Steve Ganz: Linkedin
Steve Smith: Ordered List

What is social networking?
Any time two people connect. Can be over twitter, linked in, myspace, fbook, flickr, email, im, etc.

Ways to use personal brand
Wanted to promote services and knowledge as web designers. Used the main person to sell design and services. Use social networking as a sales tool

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Tues Keynote: The Future of Happiness: Jane McGonigal, Creative Dir, Avant Game
Is it a game or is it real life? When you get right down to it, is there really a difference? Learn about the growing popularity of ARGs from one of the most innovative minds in this industry. Jane McGonigal explains what it is like to be a puppet-master of this exciting new genre.

Speech starts with a killer movie trailer for “The Lost Ring” At the www.thelostring.com. Worth checking out

It is the alternate reality game for the Olympics in China this year. About a sport that was lost and no one knows how to play. MUST check this out.

This game has been going on for a week now. Flickr photos are tagged with “tr01″ for secret q’s on the game. If you want you should go look these up as I think this is going to be massive.

Back to the panel (WHICH completely was 200% better than I expected)

Alternate Reality Game designer: Instead of making them more realistic, interactive, etc, she is trying to make the real world to be better designed, like a game. Odd idea, but let’s see how it falls out.

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Here are some tips I heard about working on your blog PR/outreach from some film bloggers at ifilm and other properties.

Know who you are talking to or writing to. Think about personally contacting bloggers yourself and not using your PR firm. They get so many PR emails that they often ignore them.

Know what they write about and be up to date with last few months of writing, if possible. This way you can craft your email TO them not AT them.

Create a company feed on Twitter for bloggers to follow you easily and get info as they need it. This way they can watch, and they do watch, for things of interest.

When people are reaching out to you, you need to reach out to them. This in NOT a one way street, but a dialogue.

Be an active listener not always a talker.

Product sampling. Giving away snippets, premiers, teaser shots, product demos, video, etc so that you can empower them to experience, taste and get more of it. Downloadable content to give people the tools to build and make things. (Like our DTI, Direct to Influencer programs at eROI)

IS “Blogger” a bad word? When do people care about bloggers? Does the word blog mean something other than something good? Some people still feel that blogging/bloggers/blog is a really low hanging fruit thing. But it really does not when you are reading real people that are good writers, well read and intelligent, with daily updates and relevant content.

Many blogs have larger readership than many print publications so make sure you are leveraging your blog outreach growth strategy.

Yeah, just a hype title for this panel. But man it was good. I was not expecting Mark Cuban to be the one interviewing Michael Eisner, made it sooo much better than I could have expected.

Eisner and Mark Cuban: The Interview

Eisner comments:
Is this the time for internet delivered stories?
Yes the time is right, make a little money, testing right now to see what works and makes money. In a short time we should find this to be a new distribution stream that will give professionally produced content via this distribution channel.

Remember VHS? I have seen this happen my entire career. “People that watch movie screens will stop watching television…” People always want to say X will kill Y. Just not true. They can coexist.

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LOPP: “There is a lot of swearing at SXSW – Be Prepared”

What do we know about Apple? Great Design, new ideas.

What words are inside design? Sign, SIN, Dine, etc…. Lots of things that design can become or mean.

How many of you are designers> (hands up all over)

Definition: Design is a present, It is an unintentional discover you make.

The obsessive design story: really odd packaging, and really strange ads. The new Mentos Box, how many people know about it? Why did they change the packaging to a box? When he closed it it clicks. There is an actual latch on it. It really works. That to Lopp is great design. Not just a square box, but one that serves a function and works.

Process = peace: in design and engineering keep them from killing one another.

Apple designs in order to give “presents”. Things that are worth waiting for. Like Apple packaging porn. They talk about how thought out the product packaging it at every step of the reveal when you open it. The stores are modeled after museums. The brand delivers the story about what you are getting for “Christmas”. That is the reoccurring theme, they design for people that look forward to Christmas AM when they get to open something that they are so excited to find out about. Design to excite, stimulate, and drive the person to WANT to own something from your brand.

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So I went into this panel expecting to discover the holy grail of what the hell people should have in mind for mobile strategy, what can be done, what will be able to be done etc. Sorry to let you know that there is not a magic bullet or an answer. It was all over the board in regard to camps of thought around what you SHOULD do and HOW you should do it.

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First you should know I love Zappos.com. When you lead with a tag line of “Powered by Service” and you deliver on service so ridiculously that it sometimes makes me laugh when we order a pair of shoes and they are there the next afternoon (no request for overnight shipping). Really this model is driving them over the top. BUT what have they learned that we cannot only learn from for Ecom business, but for for web service levels and branding?

From the Speech:
1200 brands, 200,000 styles, over 900,000 UPCs.
4 million items in warehouse
100% of products inventoried, no drop ship
7.5 million purchasing customers (2.5% of US Pop)
3.3 have purchased in last 12 months
75% pf purchases are return customers
Repeat customers have higher order size
$111 in first time order – to 143 in returning customer average in Q4 2007

On the way to break the billion dollar mark in sales.

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OpenID is a web standard that is growing fast in the past few months. It has been around since 2005 but now the giants like Google, MSN, Yahoo. IBM, and others are joining up. I talked to Scott Kveton of the OpenID board and Luke Sontag at Vidoop (side note: they just opened a Portland office) to see what impact it could have on lead capture for businesses at SXSW.

My initial thoughts were that it would hurt lead capture on sites and slow the ability to capture data on visitors, leads and customers. If the process lives outside of the site with a 2nd and 3rd party hosting the data on an individual, how would you your your brand grow a list?

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So today started out with some good panels and people that wanted to share. That is good as that I what I think this is all about.

BUT the best part of the day, so far, is the interview of facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerber, by Sarah Lacy, author, BusinessWeek columist and co-host of Yahoo Finance’s “TeckTicker”. The interview was rolling along for about 1/2 and was fairly boring. Not all the fault of Lacy as he seems hard to pull real long answers out of, unless you are asking him about conversation and communication. The best part was when the audience took control of the interview, well with the help of Zuckerberg, He basically started the downward, or upward spiral in my opinion, by asking Sarah if she was asking him a question. She was very conversational, but often times would state the answers first and then ask him to expand on her answer to her question.

The Crowd took control then. She did not help herself anymore from that point on. She statd something to the likes of “Guys don’t you know my job is really hard, Jesus!” And then things like “Why don’t you all email me afterwards and tell me where I went wrong on this interview and tell me why I suck.” She blew it. She could have really channeled the energy of the crowd to capitalize on the reactions, but I think instead she got really pissed and started just saying things like “yep, uh huh, right” instead of getting back on her horse.

The crowd then started asking questions and it turned out well. The hook to this around email marketing is that Mark Zuckerberg stated that facebook was NEVER set up to be or replace email. That is why the “inbox” of facebook is so simple. So for all of you that keep talking about how these social media sites are replacing email, not so much. At least not yet as they have so many other things to tackle he stated. Launching in French tonight, did german, spanish and looking at other languages.

I am sure that there is so much more about this on the blogosphere in greater depth that I covered.

Off to next panel with CEO of Deep Focus and lots of film bloggers.

So a quick overview. We have been hitting all sorts of great panels. Some better than others. Some have been rather motivating, others have been informational, and a few a little soft. But overall there is a huge crowd here of people from all industries learning and interacting with one another. I have been blogging some and will possibly share them later this week when I get a chance to clean them up.

A few email service providers here, which was a little surprise to me, and some of them look to have pulled out the marketing dollar stops with neck hangers, stickers, postcards, 1-sheeters, and more. Will need to swing by the exhibit floor sunday when it opens.

Some of the people I have met on Day One have been very interesting. Some have been partners or clients, and still others are just Twitter friends from PDX. Love seeing all of them.

Had a chance to hit the bloghaus towards the end of the day. It was a hidden PACKED room of bloggers from all over typing away, swilling beer and blogging. Interesting as one of the people there was a rock accordion player that was playing classic rock and singing. He should stick to just playing music. But it was different and entertaining.

Came back to drop off the goods accumulated from the day, sort through the trash, post this and then off to Dorkbot (a performance and beer drinking opp – yes there is a repeated theme here) and then off to Ave A/RXRFish, Google, 16 Bit and frogdesign event. Should be a good night. Only worried about this daylight savings thing going to happen tonight. I predict that it is going to throw a wrench in a few people’s works.