The top thought leaders in digital marketing share their insights and thoughts on the Only Influencers blog.
Last week I wrote a blog post called "Don't Read This Blog". It was inspired by a conversation on the OI discussion list that occured after I had sent a "test - ignore" email to the list. One of the influencers commented that he couldn't resist reading an email with the subject line "Ignore" in it.
So I decided to do a little experiment. I would write a series of blog posts on different topics and compare those stats to my "Don't Read" blog post. Here are the results:
One of the Influencers was recently listening to Anderson Cooper and heard him say just before going to break: "and you can follow us on Google+."
Google+? Not Facebook, not Twitter, but Google+!
One of the greatest motivational forces - one that seems underutilized in marketing - is that compelling need to do something that you have been forbidden from doing. During Prohibition, for instance, the incidents of alcoholism actually went up, not down.
This week I sent out a post to the Only Influencers Discussion list with the subject line: "Testing - Ignore". One of the influencers responded that he felt it impossible to ignore an email with the subject line that says "Ignore". How can you ignore something that commands you to ignore it?
I've spent most of my career writing and speaking about online marketing. But today I want to write about something that is unique to the Brick and Mortar store experience. Something that can't be replicated in an online enviornment. I want to talk about why I shop Macy's.
Part Two of my address at the 2011 New York Ad:tech conference: Email and Mobile:
Each week I will be posting brief summaries of the topics raised on the Only Influencers' lists. If you like this format, please tweet about it and let your network know.
Today's Digital Marketing Job Board:
1. This one is only for OI members.
2. Adknowledge: Director of Marketing
Details: Can work out of New York, LA, or Kansas City. Very nice benefit package.
3. Here is another one from San Francisco: Esurance is looking for a Database Marketing Manager
4. Merkle is looking for a VP, General Manager for their Email Marketing Practice. This one is in New York.
5. Cypra Media is looking for an Operations Director, Looks like this one is in Montreal.
6. Dela Quist and AlchemyWorx have 3 open positions in Atlanta and London. Campaign Manager is out of London, Email Production Specialist is out of Atlanta, and Business Development Rep, also out of Atlanta
7. Clickmail Marketing is looking for a Account Manager
8. SpaFinder: Email & Customer Relationship Marketing Manger, NY
9. Capital Group: Email Producer, LA
10. College Board: Senior Director of Email Marketing, NY
11. One Kings Lane: Email Marketing Manager, SF
12. Vertis: Email Services Strategist, Baltimore
13. Sears: Email Product Specialist, Chicago
14. eHarmony: Email Quality Assurance Coordinator, Santa Monica
15. CheetahMail: Director Email Marketing, Oakland, CA
16. UShip: Email Marketing Associate, Austin, TX
17. Competitor Group: Email Marketing Manager, San Diego
18. Groupon: Product Manager - Email/Direct Marketing, Chicago
19. e-Dialog: HTML Email Producer, Burlington, MA11 new Email Marketing Jobs available this week.
May 17th
Massachusetts
Company: Constant Contact
Company: Constant Contact
Company: FreshAddress
Company: Staples
Washington
Company: Eddie Bauer
California
Company: Trulia
Company: Esurance
Company: Agency360
Company: Harbor Freight Tools
Social Media Marketing Manager
Company: Tibco
New York
Senior Client Director: Email Marketing
Company: Merkle
Company: Bloomingdales
Illinois
Manager, Social Media Marketing
Company: Mead Johnson Nutrition
Virginia
Social Media Marketing Specialist
Company: NeuStar
Texas
Associate Director Digital/Mobile Marketing
Company: American General Life Companies
Associate Director - Digital/Mobile Marketing
Company: SunAmerica Financial Group
May 9th
New York
Title: Director of Email Marketing
Company: Fareportal
Title: Social Media Marketing Manager
Company: Good Samaritan Hospital
Title: Social Media Marketing Program Managaer
Company: Bloomberg
Company: The Economist Group
California
Title: Email Marketing Specialist
Company: Newegg.com
Title: Email Marketing Specialist
Company: Wells Fargo
Colorado
Title: Email Marketing Manager
Company: Good Sam Enterprises
Company: Ameritrade
Pennsylvania
Title: Manager of Social Media Marketing
Company: ANYSY
Indianapolis
title: Email Marketing Coordinator
Company: Finish Line
Florida
Title: Email Marketing Manager
Company: Golf Channel
Title: Email Marketing Product Manager:
Company: Digital
Illinois
Title: Email Marketing Analyst
Company: Newark
OHIO
Title: Senior Analyst Email Marketing
Company: Victoria's Secret
Georgia
Title: Emerging Technlogies & Social Media Marketing Specialist
Company: Porshe
This week I interview George Bilbrey, President of Return Path and Email Entrepreneur Josh Baer, whose company OtherInbox was acquired by Return Path last year.
OI: Josh, tell us a little about ContextIO?
Josh: ContextIO is a small company out of Canada that ReturnPath acquired late last year. What ContexIO does is provide an API, basically a set of tools for programmers, that want to build stuff on top of email. The API is designed to allow you to build Email into your application. Now, you might do that if you want to make an Email Client, something that is all about reading email. But more commonly you want to bring some of the data and intelligence that is in Email into something else that might have nothing to do with email.
For example, you might have a CRM application to keep track of your sales leads, and you might want to see right next to you emails exchanged with those leads or files they've sent to you. Those files are living in your inbox and are hard to unlock normally but with ContextIO it is easy for anybody to connect to the inbox and pull any of the relevant data out and show it in a contextual way, which is where the "context" part of the name comes from.
Typically if you are building something you are connecting to IMAP or Exchange or to Hotmail. Things that are not easy to program to. These are things that if you ask a programmer "hey, you want to go write some IMAP code?" , no one is happy with that. They are old protocols that are hard to work with and so what ContextIO does is give you ONE thing to write to. It is well designed, it is easy to use. You write to that one thing and you can connect to Gmail, and to IMAP and lots of other platforms in a really easy way.
OI: And who is the customer for this. Is it the ESP's or is there something here for the individual marketer with internal resources would be interested in as well?
Josh: it can be used a lot of different ways. The core market is not really ESP's or marketers but any kind of application or service that somebody might be using so it is more application developers than ESP's or things like that. What is relevant to marketers is what comes out of it. So what we can do is that the anonymous data that is pulled out of this can create some really interesting intelligence tools for marketers.
OI: Are there any tools that have been developed so far using ContextIO?
Josh: ContextIO acts as an anonymous panel that then seeds a lot of the different products that Return Path developed and has released so the most recent of those is the Inbox Inside product which is fully based on it.
OI: Return Path recently rebranded themselves as an Email Intelligence company. Can you tell me what exactly that means?
George: The goal of Email Intelligence at a high level is to take a lot of the guess work for marketers in how to optimize their email marketing program. Everyday on the Only Influencers list there is a question "say, should we do 'X' and our goal is to provide empirical evidence that if you do 'X' here is what the results are based on where you are in your email marketing program right now. So it is the application of a lot of different data - some of panel data that Josh was talking about comes from Other Inbox, some comes from ContextIO, plus our vast store of reputation data, the data we have coming from ISPs - apply some really great analytics to that and turn that into solid advice for email marketers.
OI: can you give me a concrete example of the kind of advice a marketer might be able to get out of it?
George: We had a client in the travel industry, an extremely narrow vertical, looking at how they were sending mail and the days of the week they were sending mail and looking at the days their competition was sending mail on and they found there was a whole in the calendar that no one was sending mail out on Saturdays. So they made the decision to send their mail on Saturday and those campaigns turned out to be their highest performing campaigns. Another example, we had a client that had a fair amount of deliverability issues: they were getting delivered about 92%. They wondered, could they mail more and still get delivered at the same rate? So we were able to look at both the reputation data as well as the panel data, take a look at some of their competitors and other people that looked roughly like them from a reputation standpoint and we determined that it was highly unlikely that increasing the cadence on one particular group of their subscribers was going to drive delivery issues and sure enough they were able to send more mail, get more impressions, get more views and reads without suffering any decrease in inbox placement.
'
OI: what data could marketers get using these tools that they couldn't get by just close monitoring of the email programs?
George: The key part of the question is "Close examination of their own email programs". I think what is interesting about the data we can bring to the problem is that you gain knowledge from other people email marketing experience. So what I see a lot of marketers doing is "groping for greatness", the phrase I like to use internally, they have a place where they are, they have a strategy they've been following, they have results associated with that. They have a rough idea of where they think they want to go. They do a series of A/B split tests, incrementally get to an optimum. But that optimum might be a very local optimum, it might not be the very best they can get because it is based on where their starting point is. By taking a look at what your competitors are doing and other best in class marketers are doing, you might actually be able to start in an entirely other new starting place, achieving a global optimum, not just a local optimum.
Where we are unique is we can help find where practices are going to start to get you in trouble in terms of deliverability and help you walk that fine line between optimizing read rates and responses and having deliverability problems.
OI: Are you finding that marketers are coming to you with a need for competitive intelligence?
George: We've had great success with the Inbox Inside product with marketers. I think calling it a competitive intelligence product I think sometimes is slightly limiting. I think the way I'd like to think about it: it's a tool that provides you a roadmap to higher returns on your marketing program. You can take a look at what other people are doing to determine what's working and not working and give you some great ideas for your own marketing program. If you call it Competitive Intelligence sometimes only those companies that have a Competitive Intelligence group really get excited about it.
My argument, featured in "gloves off" for DM news , is that no network is intrinsically important, and to my mind Instagram's acquisition by Facebook strengthens that idea. What do you think? Is tumblr's acquisition of Pinterest around the corner?
If you would like to weigh in on the site, please do, but I would love to hear what you all think. (see Article Here)
Nice Ben, thanks for sharing.
There are two aspects to this question - do we think photo sharing as an activity separate from other social sharing is unlikely to be self-sustaining, and do we think Pinterest itself has not been designed with enough competitive advantages to forestall competition from moving in quickly.
I suspect that photo sharing (outside of ones' own pics) is - like video - complex enough that it deserves its own space. I can't imagine an integrated user experience with either FB or Tumblr that would work as elegantly. So I'd have to say that photo-sharing as a separate utility looks like it is here to stay.
As for the second question - while I think that Pinterest in some ways is a negative for businesses (specifically its policies around link/affiliate stuff), I actually like the business model overall. They deserve kudos for actually having a business model this early on - let's face it, that's a bit of an anomaly in the social space. It's quite refreshing. I'm sure Pinterest has some growth and revisions ahead of it, and I'm not sure it's well-protected against competitors, but it does seem to have enough legs to make it a worthwhile investment for some companies right now. Anthropologie is an early adopter that seems ideally suited given the target demographics of their audience.
Which gives Pinterest another face: ultra-relevant affiliate promotions. Could Pinterest be a catalyst for consumers to create a sort of micro-affiliate market, on a far greater scale than we've seen so far? Is Pinterest really a combination of FB/Etsy or FB/eBay?
So while Pinterest may go the way of MySpace, it feels a bit more like Twitter right now. And with more potential and a better business model than that company.
My 2 cents to help start the dialogue - I'd like to hear others weigh in on this topic too.
Pinterest is enabling something that other site services and networked platforms have not, communal expression through photos. To date this has been attempted only by brand-owned platforms with very little sharing capabilities (KODAK Gallery, Snapfish, etc.).
People like to express themselves. They like to do so with varied creative techniques. Photo and picture sharing combined with a communal 'voting' or approval technique like Pinterest provides a unique media for consumers to engage with. It's not going anywhere too fast, is my bet, in its 'intrinsic networked form.'
It may be acquired, or folded into, something new. That's for sure. Because without the piggyback effect of a broad social network that exists for more than to connect consumers to their visual pinups, I do believe Pinterest begins to fall off - it just won't be FOTM (flavor of the month) at some point.
However, I might see a Google acquisition (G turbo business plan?) before I'd see Tumblr. Or really interesting ... Twitter Pinterest? That would fundamentally change how visual sharing works ... will be interesting.
No idea if Pinterest is "just a passing fad" - but it apparently is a fast-growing fad...at least according to Experian Hitwise, it is now the 3rd largest "social network" in the US having passed LinkedIn and Google+ - based on monthly site visits -Pinterest Now No. 3 US Social Network, Surpasses Linkedin
In my view, Facebook may have won the battle for the ubiquitous social network, but we've entered the era of there being room for thousands of social networks to succeed in niche areas.
I think Pinterest is a flood of copyright lawsuits waiting to happen. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the percentage of photos pinned by people with ownership rights to be in the single digits. Am I the only one that sees this as a major roadblock for Pinterest’s longevity?
Arien, it might come to pass with respect to commercial rights, given that some businesses are claiming transactions off of Pinterest engagement, but I don't know that they company is liable for the sharing of imagery any more so than Getty images if I went to the site, right-clicked an image, and put it on my web site.
Now, rights management has come up alot with Pinterest, and I'm no expert, but I'm thinking that unless there is a transaction that Pinterest is somehow taking a piece of, it will be some time before they are specifically liable for what others do with images through their technology.
That's a gut feeling from a non-legal expert in the field. But if you look at how long it's taken(ing) for digital rights management standards to form along content that is known to have monetary value (i.e. music), one might think it'll be some time before it matures into solid arguments in this case. Or maybe not.
A post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on Pinterest's Terms of Service...which just changed on April 6. Pinterest's Pernicious Terms of Service
On the rights issues:
Pinterest apparently tested one approach to generating $ from traffic to retailers, and stopped just before a blogger posted a story which created its own firestorm in Feb.
Pinterest adds disclosure about how they (might) make money. Conversations with Pinterest CEO.
While as Loren notes, pinterest updated their TOS to reflect such a possibility for the future, the monetization (via data sharing, CPA deals, affiliate links, or whatever) of the shared image make Pinterest's future appear, to me, similar to YouTube. The company will be sued, acquired- and then settle out of court for $$$.
I think like MySpace was eclipsed by Facebook, Pinterest itself could be eclipsed (or acquired) so whether they specifically will survive I don't know. I don't think the concept, however, of a visual/graphic social sharing site is a passing fad.
I think the concept IS sustainable and most likely if Pinterest doesn't evolve or build on it, someone else will (or as I mentioned will just buy them first). Because Pinterest was the first to offer/master virtual pin-boarding/scrapbooking/whatever maybe they'll be able to become entrenched enough and quickly leverage their position to stay the frontrunner – if that's what the founders want. Otherwise I suspect they'll sell.
I think there's a lot to be said for the "social scrapbooking" concept specifically around the idea of showing vs telling. Facebook, FourSquare, Twitter, LinkedIn are all so much about telling – chat, conversation, announcement, soundbite, status. But people LOVE the show as well, and as the saying goes, a picture can speak a thousand words.
There's something about a visually-rich, text-light social experience I find deeper and more satisfying than the alternatives. That said, I think Pinterest will remain niched toward users/brands/interests that skew toward and benefit from "show" at least as much as or more than "tell". So sure, the cooking and wedding planning and home décor will prevail, but it there's also the celebrity factor (neat to see what celebrities like, use and share), the expert factor (what your favorite author, chef, designer or life coach is doing) and the topical-community factor (easier to share prom dress ideas/photos here or places not to miss in say, Istanbul, than on other platforms) to consider.
I love how brands that are a natural fit are using it – like Horchow – and it gives them more specialized real estate to "show" than either a print catalog or their website – both of which are built more to sell than act like an interior design service.
Karen, great thought process on all of this…thank you.
I’ve had versions of these same ideas floating around in my mind for months, but your write-up crystallized it better than I could have. For me, the turning point (if that’s the right phrase) from ‘telling’ to ‘showing’ was Instagram. I had soured on Facebook over 2 years ago, to this day I rarely go on it. Same with FourSquare – it just got old really fast, felt like a rat pecking the bar for a fresh food pellet for every check-in.
Then Instagram came along and immediately it was awesome: a photo and a few words or hash tags is just extremely compelling. And I’m not even a “visual” person as much as other people are. IG is in my shortlist of iPhone To-Do’s first thing every morning (with checking email and catching up on Words with Friends). One key to both Instagram and Pinterest is the ability to so effortlessly explore & discover other content. And even when it comes to “likes” (and follows and comments) – I’ll trade one random-stranger-from-Japan’s Like on IG or Pinterest for 5 friends Liking a FB post or 10 new Twitter followers/retweets.
Also, not mentioned enough is that every new social channel like Pinterest means another fresh wave of fodder for MarketingProfs (et al)!
One thing that continues to confound me about a lot of the conversations about social networks/channels/tools on this and the Email list is that there is often an assumption that for something to be viable and valuable - it has to be ubiquitous and everyone must like it.
Foursquare and checkins won't succeed unless there is broad adoption (but I can still have fun getting more points than you) - but not everything will have to beat Facebook or have 1 billion users to survive. Just ask Bill McCloskey. I think it is OK that you love Instagram and I love Foursquare...but not the other way around.
Melinda J. Smith is the Program Manager for Expedia. This is her story. If you like Meliinda's story, share it with your network and help her win a bottle of wine:
denise cox (and yes she likes her name in lower case letters) has been the lead consultant for Newsweaver for the last 11 years. This is her story. If you like denise's story, share it with your network and help her win a bottle of wine.
Chester Bullock has been with AAA Arizona and will be starting as Senior Manager of Email Development at Merkle. This is his story. If you like Chester's story, share it with your network and help him win a bottle of wine.
It has been an interesting few weeks at Only Influencers headquarters.
First, Only Influencers was listed by Upcity.com as one of the 25 Best Places to learn about Email Marketing: 25 Experts To Learn About Small Business Email Marketing.
I was also personally listed as 50 Marketing Leaders Over 50 You Should Know which will also be featured in the May edition of CMO Magazine.
And finally, Simms Jenkins mentioned Only Influencers in his article the Future of New Inbox: "New email-focused business models lead to where email is going. The daily deal companies have generated further awareness for email's clout, but companies like LiveIntent, Movable Ink, Only Influencers, and dozens of hyper-focused agencies have emerged to capitalize on email's staying power as the stickiest of all web apps, plus the dynamic new nature of how consumers and businesses consume their email and interact with their inbox.
Special thanks to everyone who mentioned us.
Today my son turns 21. It is hard to believe, it really does seem like yesterday that I brought him home wrapped in a blanket and laid him down in his crib .
I started thinking about all that has transpired in that time.
Perhaps you are just starting out in your career. Or perhaps you are approaching your 40's, thinking your career and your life are set in stone. But you never know what life has in store:
Welcome to the Only Influencers Blog. Only influencers is an idea that I have had rattling around in the back of my mind for some time now. Over 8 years ago I started a list for digital marketers called The One Hundred Club and 6 years ago I started The Inbox Insiders. Both lists were predicated on the notion that there was a need for a curated, invitation only discussion list. And the success of both of those lists as the place where real discussion about our industry happen: behind closed doors, in a safe haven. That tradition carries on with Only Influencers which takes the place of those other lists, morphing them into something bigger and better, and not available any place else. What is Only Influencers? Only Influencers is Fight Club.
Bill McCloskey 
Bill McCloskey 
Gretchen Scheiman 
Christopher Donald 
Karen Talavera