Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl: August 2011

A rant about webinar content

HubSpot webinars are starting to suck. Today's webinar was supposed to be on "The Competitive Edge: Social Business and Competitive Analysis". Now there's 25 minutes of my life I can't get back. If you're going to use marketing buzz words in your presentation agenda to attract an audience to your webinar, at least cover them in the webinar with sample campaign data and/or qualitative facts.

Tracking QR Codes with Google Analytics

Start by going to Google's URL Builder.

Step 1: Fill in the campaign information in the appropriate fields.

Step 2: Shorten the generated URL with bit.ly or other popular link shortener

Step 3: Feed that shortened URL into a QR Code Converter
Step 4: Use generated image in print, online, or mixed media campaign

Renewable Energy - Solar

The Pacific Northwest is not known for its abundance of sunlight nor wind power and yet both types of renewable energy are growing in popularity for residential and commercial use. In southwest Washington state, most of our electricity comes from BPA's 31 hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River.

When considering the switch from natural gas to solar electric water heating, I would have to replace a natural gas water heater with an electric solar water heater. This involves a) finding a unit that will fit the needs of this property, b) finding a supplier and c) having a certified vendor install the unit. As a residential customer, I don't really care about the qualitative benefits (see pros and cons of solar below) of using sustainable energy. At the end of a billing cycle, it's all about the monthly bill and the lifetime cost of ownership of the unit. If I can get the meter to tick backwards, that'd be a big plus, but it's not the primary driver for research into this household appliance.

The case for solar

Year	Cost of Gas	Gas avg/month	Cost of Electricity	Electricity avg/month
2010	$614	$50	$249	$21
2011 (thru July)	$385	$55	$155	$22

To look at actual water heater consumption, one would probably have to compare summer months to winter months. It does snow here and only a few days a year. During the winter, the thermostat is set to 62 degrees F. During the summer, it's been so mild, bordering on chilly, that I haven't turned on the a/c. The graph below shows annual natural gas and electricity costs; where energy consumption is a direct correlation to cost.

When I think about it in this context, I don't really have a data-justified case to add a solar water heater since I'd still be consuming natural gas to heat the home. Natural gas consumption has already declined month-over-month since installing the programmable thermostat (a unit that has paid for itself in energy savings vs regular usage). I haven't done nearly enough calculations to proceed further.

Pros:

Zero emissions; no pollution
Quiet energy production
Installation in remote locations more cost-effective than high voltage wires
Able to use existing footprint (e.g. angled or flat rooftops)
Unlimited energy eventually pays for the installed unit(s)
Less dependent on fossil-fuel-dependent energy (e.g. coal, nuclear)
SmartGrid, NetMetering eligible
Cash incentives from regional utility providers (see below)

Cons:

Steep (initial) cost of the solar cells and/or panel array
Pollution in dense metro areas can affect collection efficiency of the panels
Effective during daylight hours; significantly less available "energy" during winter months
Collector efficiency is affected by severe weather conditions (snow, hail, blizzard blackout conditions)

Data Fluke

This looks suspicious...

Within Blogger's dashboard, there's an option to look at a blog's stats. I believe this is a defunct app that is separate from Google Analytics. What is peculiar about this graph is that there's no data history prior to July 2009 even though I started writing this blog in 2005. The fact that 24,700 PV were registered on a single month is another oddity. I'd speculate that whoever originally coded the stat function within Blogger (or BlogSpot) did something to mucky up how stats were generated and wiped out all historic data for this site when the feature went live. The number of pageviews could be an accumulation from 2005 to 2009. Maybe?

Reminder: Canada's Anti-Spam Law

Scrub those databases and marketing lists. Enforcement of Canada's anti-spam law begins September 2011. Read about the basics here.

LinkedIn and User Privacy

Perhaps you were among the 100 million users who got automatically opted into LinkedIn's ad network, or perhaps you read about it through some social media site. Not terribly interested in having your demographics used within ad targeting? Here's how to opt-out:

Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right corner). On the drop-down menu, select "Settings"
From the “Settings” page, select “Account”
In the column next to “Account”, click “Manage Social Advertising”
Un-check the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising”

You could also turn on/off Enhanced Advertising, Partner InMail, data sharing with 3rd party applications, invitations to participate in research, and LinkedIn announcements.

I'm a bit surprised that LinkedIn didn't have any Home dashboard messaging about the mass opt-in change to user settings. At least users have the ability to opt in and out when they want to. Options are always good. We make better decisions when presented with many options instead of few or none.

At age 102, get targeted for age 65+

Based on Yahoo profile information and other clever marketing tactics, this would explain how I had gotten onto AARP's postal mailing list. The retired and elderly are sent morbid publications. Brochures for funeral and cremation services, cemetery plots, and hearing aid ads are just the starters. Back in 2004 when I created a primary Yahoo mail account, I may have fux0red on the birthday question. Peeking at my profile info, it says "born in January 1909". *laugh* How much should you glean from a user's profile for marketing promotions anyways, and should you treat all the user-input fields at face value?

What is interesting to note about Yahoo's ad targeting engine is their data table for IP address location lookups. It seems to be a bit b0rked. France, really? If Yahoo's targeting is off by an entire continent for what seems to be an elementary use of scripting code, would you trust them with your geo-targeted ad content and budget?

Lightning May Be Hazardous to Your Cloud

Typically data centers are in places where the land and facilities are cheaper than say in a windowless building in downtown metropolis. You'll find yottabytes data centers twiddling away in remote places like Fargo ND (Microsoft), The Dalles OR (Google), Allen TX (Cisco), and internationally in locations such as Ireland, China, India, or Japan. Remember virtualization? Well, it's more or less the same to marketers as cloud computing. Regardless of what you call your online data storage method or how your firm accesses it, that data still resides on a physical machine plugged into an electrical grid.

A lot of data bits we use in our daily lives are making their way to the cloud. Name any online service (Flickr, Google Docs, Amazon AWS, Office Live, Adobe AIR) and some or all of its data is hosted virtually. Businessweek notes these two primary risks of using cloud computing:

Risk #1 - your data could be exposed to third parties
Risk #2 - data and apps may only be available when you are connected to the Internet AND when that service is up and running

A simple act of nature can blow up backup generators, disrupt electricity, and take entire systems offline and require manual operations (actual human technicians) to bring those systems back online.

With that in mind, is your business ready for the cloud?

Sears Rewards Program #FAIL

Thanks a lot Sears, I really didn't need to be spammed by all your eCommerce entities all at once. Sears is typically where I go to get tools and appliances for the home; although, in today's age, Home Depot wins out on in-store price comparisons and Lowes wins on customer service; at least in southwest Washington anyways. The customer experience is probably different where you live. Regardless, this post reflects upon the poor execution of what could have been a good retention marketing campaign by the Sears rewards program.