I am killing the ATDC marketing circle and Internet circle. These were small monthly gatherings of startup types that were interested in either topic. I will continue to support Brandy Nagel who spearheaded the marketing circle effort.
If anyone wants to engage with me about either subject hit the BookNow button in the right side bar and make yourself an appointment.
Update: The marketing circle lives on. Brandy has moved the event to Friday mornings from 8:30 - 10:30. You can register here.
I have this theory. It's most likely not going to be real popular. But I have this theory. It's a theory about how social media marketing is going to evolve. The theory goes a little bit like this.
Social media is small part of the interactive marketing pie. It's growing fast. But right now it is small. In it's infancy even. A mere $700 million sliver of a $25 billion dollar pie. If you go back and look at Internet ad spending history the entire category was $600 million in 1997. In terms of social media spend it is 1997.
Think about 1997 and interactive marketing. DoubleClick was hot. Yahoo! was hot. Pointcast was hot. So hot that News Corp offered $450 million to buy them.
Google was just a sparkle in Larry's and Sergey's eyes. That $600 in
revenue was nearly all being spent on interactive display advertising. Advertising that was chasing online eyeballs. Social media marketing is a lot like interactive marketing in 1997 from a market development point of view as well. Conversations, engagement, followers, and fans are the eyeballs of yesteryear.
Take a gander at Forrester's interactive advertising spend projections below. Notice anything interesting about it?
I do.
Look at the more mature categories of email marketing, display advertising, and search marketing. It's obvious that search marketing dominates. It dominates because of its direct response nature. What might not be quite so obvious, because you need to dig a little deeper into the underlying numbers, is that a steady state of 70% of interactive marketing spending is being used for direct marketing activities.
My theory on social media marketing is that it is going to mature to a state very similar to other online marketing categories. Most of the growth projected for the social media category is going to be spent on direct response marketing activities. The entire reason interactive marketing has grown is it is more measurable, less expensive, and more revenue focused than traditional media. If CMOs are going to shift their budgets into social they are going to demand the same type of performance.
It's really no surprise that marketers want to invest in activities that are both efficient and measurable. But there is another side of the coin, the side of the social media user. The common wisdom is that social media users don't want to be sold, they want deeper engagement. But no one wants to "be sold" in any medium from mass market advertising to one on one sales. People want to buy.
Regardless, eMarketer recently highlighted a study by Marketing Sherpa that addressed this issue.
Why many users are indeed interested in deeper engagement, the number one motivation why users followed/friended companies was to learn about specials and sales. This supported an earlier study by Razorfish.
Social media users want deals. If marketers are going to be successful they are going to have to give them deals.
Based on their behavior interactive marketers want efficient measurable revenue focused opportunities. Social media users want deals. But them together and you have social media looking a lot like other more mature interactive marketing mediums. Or so my theory goes. But is it just a theory.
Very interested in what the smart marketers and social media users that comprise the readership of FoG have to say about the matter.
So I was having lunch with an entrepreneur that I respect recently. We started talking about email marketing. The conversation went something like this.
Entrepreneur: How do you feel about email marketing.
Lance: What do you mean?
E: Sending out emails.
L: Did they opt in to receive emails specifically from your company?
E: No.
L: Did they indicate in some way that they would be interested in receiving emails from your company?
E: No.
L: How did you get their names?
E: Purchased well targeted lists that have shown an interest in our category.
L: That is unsolicited email. It's spam.
E: Some marketing guy told me it was ok if it was well targeted.
L: It's spam. Don't do it.
Now I am surely not pure but if someone has not given you permission to send them an email, like double opt-in permission, don't do it. It is unsolicited email. It's spam.
My background working for an ISP and an email security may bias me quite a bit.
I have been involved in the Internet industry a long time. Much much longer than most people reading this ever heard of Netscape. Much much longer than most people reading this have been online.
Well a long time ago in a place far far away the evil empire with its death star logo known as AT&T came into the Internet access market and dropped prices by 40%, wiping out the profit margins for the startup where I was working at the time.
One of our strategies for fixing this problem was to create what we called incremental revenue. Revenue from things other than access. And we dreamed up all kinds of services that we could upsell our customer base on. And being good little marketers we toted this ideas into a room with M&M's and a one way mirror so that we could watch our customers reaction to our brilliant ideas.
Within minutes our plans were dashed. One participant pretty quickly declared "I can find it for free at..." to a quick discussion and nodding of heads. This was repeated over and over again. It has been repeated over and over again in every research project that I have been involved in on the subject. People don't want to pay for content on the Internet because they believe, they know, they can find it somewhere for free.
I bring this up as the fact that Newsday has garnered a total to 35 subscribers to its paywall service in the last 90 days. Nine thousand dollars in revenue on a web property that cost $4 million (an ungodly sum) to redesign and relaunch.
People will not pay for Internet content that they can find for free elsewhere. Trying to get them to do so is foolish.
With unemployment sitting at 10%, out of control U.S. government spending, tight credit markets, and wars waging in all sorts of places on the surface 2010 looks kinda tough. But it has to be better than 2009.
When the financial crisis first hit back in September of 2008 the general advice that I was giving startups was essentially make it through 2009 and 2010 will be a better day. I still believe that to be true. 2009 was about survival, 2010 will be about growth. Growth is good.
The availability of capital will increase in 2010. This will be driven by a continued acceleration of M&A activity in 2010. According to DMNews, citing a report by Petsky Prunier (a digital media, information, and marketing investment bank) a total of 201 deals valued at $13.5 billion occurred in Q4 2009, a 78%
jump vs. Q3 and a 246% increase compared with Q4 2008. Nice numbers. If this exit trend continues as companies seek to buy both top line sales growth as well as innovative technologies it will trickle down to increased earlier stage investments. As a result, I expect to see a small surge of early stage and follow on investments toward the middle of the year.
2010 will see significant strides in the development of applications that make meaning from the ever increasing stream of data flowing through the Internet to make it more relevant and useful. I see this happening in both consumer and business markets. Cloud computing and the ability to manage such resources will see much development in the coming year and we may finally start to see meaningful semantic apps that will lead to the next stage of the development of the Internet in ways that we are only beginning to understand.
So goodbye two thousand nine, hello twenty ten. It's going to be a good year.
This morning I found a nice message in my mail box. A snippet of what it contained is below.
Yes 336 messages awaiting my response. Each with its own little check box spread across 27 distinct pages. And to quote LinkedIn's help pages "Deleting an item from your 'Inbox' is not an available function." Good grief. They have a function called archiving but it would require at least 363 clicks to clean out my Inbox.
I am declaring LinkedIn messaging amnesty.
Guilt is not a good method to increase use. LinkedIn needs a mass Inbox delete function or use of a river metaphor to handle messages.
This morning I woke up to find Ev's avatar in my personal tweet stream.
I was a bit taken aback. I don't follow @ev. Did not understand why he showed up. So I followed the link and sure enough he does a fine job explaining this.
Seems like Twitter has a bit of an retweet attribution problem. Here is how they decided to solve it.
"In order to get rid of the attribution
confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the
original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you
actually follow) in the metadata underneath."
So Fred Wilson, whom I follow, is merely mentioned in small text at the base of the retweet. Ev, who I do not follow, is noted prominently with his avatar and user name.
End result is increased exposure, reach, and influence for users that get retweeted. It will be interesting to see how this effects user behavior.
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person on entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
1
