Contact Curation

Once a year I glean through my entire roster contacts on LinkedIn and push people off the island. It's not a long list and I do like to stay in contact with people. Perhaps this is due to the marketer in me. Usually it's people who have done one of the following things:

• Not made a post, comment, or share by social media, email, phone or mail
• Recruiters who have not done the above
• Connections I have never met in real life who do the above

The exception to this are those I've added to my LinkedIn roster because they have a skill or expertise I want to know more about (e.g., I met this Caucasian guy who is fluent in Mandarin whose role is to mitigate between domestic US and foreign subsidiaries.. that is very, very cool), I want to meet them some day, or their company makes something awesome and meeting their CEO or founders would make a great memory; or I met them in person and they would make a fantastic connection.

It's hard to tell who you can connect to based on LinkedIn settings. I don't mind writing referrals for people who are connected to me to their 2nd degree contacts. I do mind getting pinged by invite hoarders. People whose claim to fame on LinkedIn is 5000+ contacts on LinkedIn. I think you're just setting yourself up for a lot of spam if you do that. Just how many people connections do you need to become a rain maker? Would these connections want to refer business to you?

Having never made a LinkedIn article post, it bugs me that my profile has 500+ followers, most of whom I'm not even connected to on a 1st degree basis. I'm not sure how LinkedIn came up with this feature. Maybe you automatically follow someone if you comment on their shared links or posts.

Supercharge Your List Growth

When I'm at social or networking events, one of the most commonly asked questions I get from small business owners and nonprofit groups is how to grow their membership or customer list. Even having the option to sign up for a newsletter or special offers on one's website can provide enough incentive to get prospective customers to sign up. 

Here are a few tips:

More is better.  As in adding more opt-in forms to your site. What you are aiming for with any mailing list is quality, not quantity. Many times I've seen the newsletter sign-up link below the fold (if you have to page-down to see content, it's below the fold) or buried under layers of content, like hidden where a company's press releases are. You want this web contact form to be found easily and not just by search engines, but by prospective customers.

Include mobile as an option. Should your customers check their email from web-capable phones, tablets, or other mobile devices, you may also want to add a SMS option to the newsletter sign-up form and optimize its accompanying landing pages for mobile. 
Examples: OfficeMax, Bed Bath & Beyond

Attract like honey. Give your subscribers a perk for signing up, thanking them for opting in. Types of perks vary by organizational type. For example:

• Schools or PTAs: a discount card to be used at a local business
• Retail: discount next purchase (online or in-store), free small item, free points on loyalty card program, early preview on upcoming sale items
• Nonprofit Assn: inclusiveness messaging (news and events just for members)
• B2B: actionable insight from industry news/trends

Oracle Topliners Opt-in Override

The wording on this one is certainly something to note, or at least comment on. It reads as though I was opted in without having actually subscribed to the list. Oracle, on the whole, does not market to marketers all that well. The content certainly wasn't all that compelling, and the newsletter format is weak. I can't decide if this is being driven by Eloqua or Oracle.

Oracle Topliners email newsletter, 2015-01-29

Long ago, I did join an Eloqua community user group called Topliners. It's morphed into this years later. Eloqua pitches a better marketing automation solution than the one it just executed on behalf of Oracle. It begs the question.. why wait three years before sending an user newsletter?

5 Things Learned at Vancouver's Economic Breakfast

This year's event at the Vancouver Hilton attracted 500 businesses, politicians, and other movers and shakers that work in and around the Clark County region. The keynote speaker was Ken Fisher of Fisher Investments, whose dry wit humor either met a really tough crowd or it was too Californian for the Pacific Northwest. After hearing his speech, I wondered if I sounded like that to PNWers when I relocated from California to Washington.

Get there early, at least a half hour before breakfast starts. You can mingle and network with other early risers before settling down on a table for breakfast.

Bring your "A" game in social networking to this event, because social + networking has nothing to do with posting a status online. As a commercial real estate agent said to me at the event, it's all about schmoozing.

Dress to impress, like you would if you were going for a job interview. The event has panel sessions after the breakfast. This your chance to ask industry insiders about their take on what's happening in the city or county -and- make an impression. You never know what opportunities may arise from meeting each panel of speakers.

Sit with some rain makers. You may not know who they are or what companies they work for. Heck, half the attendees look like they could be retired. You are better off sitting with old geezers (men and women) for their wealth of knowledge, than with younger, snappy dressed people.. unless you are trying to pick someone up as a dating prospect. Vancouver's economic breakfast audience is made up of four distinct types: older generation (50+ yrs old), local government officials and their staffers, CEOs and entrepreneurs, and students. Ok, there are really five groups but the fifth doesn't want you at their table (these people have purchased a table just for their company and/or friends; it's very clique-ish). It makes for interesting table discussions during breakfast. Because of the noise of the banquet hall, you are limited to intimate conversations of people sitting on either side of you. The first time I attended, I sat at a city official table before reading the sign on the table. That was awkward.

The breakfast is a venue for making connections happen. Be that guy (or gal) who knows a guy (or gal) that knows a guy (or gal). Everyone brings something to this event. And, everyone has the potential of becoming more than just that guy (or gal) you met or sat with at breakfast.

Sometimes, Automatic Scripting Errs

One of the many problems plaguing crowdsourced traffic data are the errors. Part of this is due to Google partnering with Waze, a mobile app that crowdsources traffic data from users on the road. Sure, Interstate 5 is a very long freeway and it spans across the western US coast. Given the masses of regional data that Google has at its disposal, one would think that having a traffic incident related to the King County metro area wouldn't show up in the Portland/Clark County metro area, 170 miles away. Why this incident shows up at the Washington/Oregon border is anyone's guess.

In the Waze smartphone app, users can indicate the speed and flow of the route they are currently on. An incident happening on I-5, might not actually be in Seattle but be somewhere on the Portland portion of I-5. For example:

2015-01-20, a Seattle incident reported in Portland

Email Layouts

Don't treat your whitepapers like they're just something to read. Think of your audience. Think of how they'd react when they seem something like this:

It could just be that it's late at night and I'm tired. Doesn't this layout just scream "delete me"? And, you'd think that a publication whose audience is made up of CMOs that the little things like content layout and a thought-provoking headline would be used. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that this entire email was packaged and sent by a bot.

Battle of the Roasters

Who else would pay a premium on premium roasted coffee than the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. It's no surprise that Starbucks has chosen to setup their "one-of-a-kind shrine to coffee" here, as their email announcement suggests. Stumptown Coffee (a local-to-Portland coffee roaster and purveyor) also has a newly opened roasting operation in Seattle as well. No doubt, they've noticed that Portlanders and Seattlites alike gift their bags of coffee to other coffee aficionados.

It would be a sad day to see Stumptown Coffee in an establishment other than a coffee house or acquired by a Starbucks-like conglomerate (let's hope that never happens). Stumptown Coffee has shops in Portland, Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles; whereas Starbucks is just about on every street corner with a heartbeat.

My little inkdot of a city has a population of 160,000+ and still has no Stumptown Coffee shop. Alas, I don't think our city meets the demographic or market size specs for the audience that Stumptown is targeting. After all, what's the cost of short drive into Portland for coffee besides the expenditure of transportation for a tax-free purchase? There are other local coffee roasters here like Paper Tiger, Torque, Compass, and my favorite Brewed Awakenings.

What's amusing about technology is that almost 20 yrs ago I wrote a business plan for an entrepreneurship course where my business model was a cyber cafe. It is astonishing to see how WiFi and the ridiculously cheap price of high speed internet has transformed eateries and coffee shops to all become BYOD (bring your own device) cyber cafes. Anyhow. That's it for this post.