How the heck did this happen? In the “offline” world, the “spray and pray” approach never works. Imagine if Romeo went up to Juliet at that first party and just started shouting why he was perfect for her and that they needed to get married before it was too late. What if Gatsby blasted Daisy’s house with letter after letter about how they needed to rekindle their relationship? 

Now we know that these examples are both from literature, not real life, so you must be wondering … are genuine social media relationships even possible today? The answer is yes — and we’ve got a real-life example to prove it. By truly engaging with someone in social media, one company was able to turn a happy customer into a passionate evangelist. 

A Tweet Come True

Have you heard about the time Morton’s Steakhouse sent Peter Shankman a steak at the airport after a long flight? Although it happened a few years ago, it’s one of the best examples of going the extra mile to develop real relationships with customers through Twitter. If you’re not caught up, here’s what happened:

Peter Shankman (founder of Help A Reporter Out, social media marketer, and steak lover) had a long day. He woke up at 3:30 a.m. and flew to Miami for a lunch meeting, only to catch the 5 p.m. flight back. While boarding his flight back, Peter started craving food from one of his favorite restaurants, so he jokingly tweeted:

Hey @mortons - can you meet me at newark airport with a porterhouse when I land in two hours?K, thanks.

— Peter Shankman (@petershankman) August 17, 2011

To Peter’s surprise, as he walked toward his car, he was met by a man in a tuxedo. The man worked for Morton’s Steakhouse. He had brought Peter a Porterhouse steak, an order of Colossal Shrimp, a side of potatoes, and bread. 

Peter was so floored, he turned to Twitter again to share his excitement: 

Oh. My. God. I don’t believe it. @mortons showed up at EWR WITH A PORTERHOUSE! lockerz.com/s/130578715 # OMFG!

— Peter Shankman (@petershankman) August 18, 2011 

Talk about going above and beyond for your customers! Even though Morton’s knew it had Peter’s business already, the restaurant went the extra mile to delight him and strengthen their relationship — all from one tweet. Now that’s a great example of how you can use social media to delight a customer. 

With the right strategy and tools, your business could be using social media to form real relationships with leads and customers, too. The Morton’s example only gives you one piece of the pie — delighting an existing customer — but there’s more to this story. You can use social media to help develop relationships with prospects, leads, and customers throughout the entire marketing funnel. Check out the infographic below to see how social media relationships can develop like real relationships to benefit your entire business.

The Social Part of Social Media: A Love Story

(Embed This Infographic)

Have you encountered any true, human, relationships on social media? Do you have ideas for how to create them? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!

Image Credit: Brandon Christopher Warren

The post What a Real Relationship in Social Media Should Look Like [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on rehavaPress.

Well, that’s exactly what Arrested Development did. After Netflix brought the show back to life for a final season that would only be available through the Netflix streaming service, the show launched one of the most creative integrated inbound marketing campaigns we’ve ever seen, using content across multiple channels to target the show’s core viewer demographic — young, sarcastic internet junkies who love smart humor.

The campaign is not only hilarious and brilliantly executed, but it also focuses on one of the main components of inbound marketing: content. This content — online and offline — is aligned perfectly with the show’s target audience. It doesn’t interrupt people; it delights them. The campaign is creative and clever — each piece pulling you further down the funnel to the final point of conversion: watching Arrested Development on May 26.

To show you why this campaign is just so darn awesome and lovable, we gathered the best parts in one place. As a truly integrated inbound marketing campaign, there are a ton of moving parts — so we’ve grouped them into three main themes.

P.S. If you aren’t familiar with Arrested Development humor, it certainly isn’t PG. Some screenshots bely such humor.

Theme 1: Tobias Fünke’s Acting Reel

Tobias Fünke is one of the show’s most colorful characters. A former doctor turned struggling actor, he often peppers his speech with unintentional double entendres. This part of the campaign brings Tobias Fünke to life under the premise that he’s trying to get James Cameron to cast him in a movie.

InsertMeAnywhere.biz

This website is Tobias’ audition reel with a twist — he’s recorded and photographed himself in front of a green screen, so all James Cameron (or any other director) would have to do is “insert him anywhere” within a movie.

Choose one of his “characters” and then download the videos and photos to use for yourself. This type of interactive content is exactly what the Arrested Development fans love. We had to try it, too: Check out Tobias with HubSpot co-founders Brian and Dharmesh on stage at last year’s INBOUND conference!

You can also see his video reel collection here:

Among all the hilarious content on the site, there is one hidden gem that makes the site even more realistic — the ManGo Juice ad at the bottom. At first glance, it seems like just another spammy banner ad, but when you click on it, you’re taken to another site featuring Tobias in one of his acting roles.

Thought we were done? Not just yet. There’s one more surprise on these websites. If you open up your browser’s console (right click, choose ‘Inspect Element,’ and then click ‘Console’ from the navigation) to look at both sites’ code, you’ll see quotes from Tobias — an Easter egg that a true fan would find and love. 

PR Outreach

The Arrested Development team also reached out to the media get Tobias’ site some attention. But instead of sending a run-of-the-mill press release about the new website and promotion, the team sent letters to the press pretending to be Tobias. Peter Kafka from AllThingsD received one: 

We love this letter because it wasn’t a “spray and pray approach” — it used creative content to delight journalists.

Reddit Post

To round out the campaign, the marketing team also posted the website on the Arrested Development subreddit on behalf of Tobias. Besides this post, Tobias also had a history of posting to other subreddits, which further brought his character to life.

Reddit loved it. And considering Reddit is a notoriously hard community to please – blatant self-promotion is one of the biggest no-no’s of the site — this was an extraordinary feat for the marketing team.

Theme 2: In-Product Easter Eggs

The Arrested Development and Netflix marketing teams also included some awesome Easter eggs within Netflix to excite fans and existing Netflix customers. Each Easter egg references something in the show — when you click on the egg, you are taken to the point in the episode where the reference is explained. While none of these eggs are huge pieces of content, they are little touch points that allow the show to build continuous momentum for the launch. Here are some of the best ones:

Fake Shows

Within the plot, the Arrested Development characters often reference fictional TV shows such as Girls with Low Self Esteem, Scandalmakers, and Boyfights. So, Netflix created listings for each show that appear among the rest of Netflix’s real listings.

Netflix Bananas

Normally, Netflix ratings take the shape of a star. But for Arrested Development, they are shaped like bananas — referencing the much-beloved Bluth banana stand from the show.

Blue Handprints

One of the first Easter eggs Netflix created appears when you search for a show or movie with the word “blue” in it. On the right side of the screen, you’ll notice blue handprints and smears, which references one of the top recurring jokes revolving around Tobias painting himself blue to audition for The Blue Man Group. 

Yellow Bowtie

Last but not least, Netflix features a little yellow bowtie in the footer of every page — referencing Buster’s accident from a seal with a yellow bowtie. We especially love that the bowtie appears across the entire site, allowing more fans to actually discover the Easter egg.

Theme 3: Interactive Experiences in the “Real World”

Engaging inbound marketing doesn’t just have to happen online — it can happen in the real world, too. To gain even more momentum over the last month leading up to the premiere, Arrested Development created real world and online experiences for fans. These were some of the best:

#ADWorldTour

Arrested Development toured the world with Bluth’s Original Frozen Bananas stand and the Bluth Company stair car to bring the TV show to life. Fans could take pictures with Arrested Development stars and some of the show’s most famous props, and then continue the conversation online with the hashtag, #ADWorldTour. What rabid fan wouldn’t want a picture with the most famous props in the show? 

#BluthHunt

The team also embraced visual content for a real world and online event. Arrested Development placed nine print posters all over New York City — one for each of the show’s characters — and then asked its fans to find them. If a fan could find all nine posters, snap a picture, then tag them on Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #BluthHunt, a tenth poster would be released online. We love how this promo integrates both online and offline tactics, so both local and global fans could benefit.

Seamless.com Order

Of all the promotions the Arrested Development marketing team launched, this is one of the coolest. The team created a fake Seamless.com account for Bluth’s Original Frozen Bananas — each item specifically referencing a joke within the show. Unfortunately, you can’t actually order anything, but at least the “out of stock” copy is a hilarious reference to the show as well! We especially love this part of the campaign, because it shows there are so many ways to use creative content online.

Sunday will be the test — will this creative inbound marketing campaign pay off? We’ll just have to wait and see. If all else fails, Arrested Development can take solace in the fact that there’s always money in the banana stand.

What do you think of Arrested Development‘s marketing campaign? How would you make it even better?

Image Credit: methodshop.com

The post The Most Magical Moments From the Arrested Development Launch Campaign appeared first on rehavaPress.

  

As a mobile UI or UX designer, you probably remember the launch of Apple’s first iPhone as if it was yesterday. Among other things, it introduced a completely touchscreen-centered interaction to a individual’s most private and personal device. It was a game-changer.

Today, kids grow up with touchscreen experiences like it’s the most natural thing. Parents are amazed by how fast their children understand how a tablet or smartphone works. This shows that touch and gesture interactions have a lot of potential to make mobile experiences easier and more fun to use.

Challenging Bars And Buttons

The introduction of “Human Interface Guidelines” and Apple’s App Review Board had a great impact on the quality of mobile applications. It helped a lot of designers and developers understand the core mobile UI elements and interactions. One of Apple’s popular suggestions, for instance, is to use UITabBar and UINavigationBar components — a guideline that many of us have followed, including me.

In fact, if you can honestly say that the first iPhone application you designed didn’t have any top or bottom bar elements, get in touch and send over a screenshot. I will buy you a beer and gladly tweet that you were ahead of your time.

My issue with the top and bottom bars is that they fill almost 20% of the screen. When designing for a tiny canvas, we should use every available pixel to focus on the content. In the end, that’s what really matters.

In this innovative industry, mobile designers need some time to explore how to design more creative and original interfaces. Add to that Apple’s frustrating rejection of apps that “think outside the box,” it is no surprise that experimental UI and UX designs such as Clear and Rise took a while to see the light of day. But they are here now. And while they might be quite extreme and focused on high-brow users and early adopters, they show us the great creative potential of gesture-driven interfaces.

Pulling to refresh feels very intuitive.

The Power Of Gesture-Driven Interfaces

For over two years now, I’ve been exploring the ways in which gestures add value to the user experience of a mobile application. The most important criterion for me is that these interactions feel very intuitive. This is why creative interactions such as Loren Brichter’s “Pull to Refresh” have become a standard in no time. Brichter’s interaction, introduced in Tweetie for iPhone, feels so intuitive that countless list-based applications suddenly adopted the gesture upon its appearance.

Removing UI Clutter

A great way to start designing a more gesture-driven interface is to use your main screen only as a viewport to the main content. Don’t feel obliged to make important navigation always visible on the main screen. Rather, consider giving it a place of its own. Speaking in terms of a virtual 2-D or 3-D environment, you could design the navigation somewhere next to, below, behind, in front of, above or hidden on top of the main view. A dragging or swiping gesture is a great way to lead the user to this UI element. It’s up to you to define and design the app.

What I like about Facebook and Gmail on iOS, for instance, is their implementation of a “side-swiping” menu. This trending UI concept is very easy to use. Users swipe the viewport to the right to reveal navigation elements. Not only does this make the app very content-focused, but accessing any section of the application takes only two to three touch interactions. A lot of apps do far worse than that!

Facebook and Gmail’s side-swiping menu

In addition to the UI navigation, your app probably also supports contextual interactions, too. Adding the same two or three buttons below every content item will certainly clutter the UI! While buttons might seem to be useful triggers, gestures have great potential to make interaction with content more intuitive and fun. Don’t hesitate to integrate simple gestures such as tapping, double-tapping and tapping-and-holding to trigger important interactions. Instagram supports a simple double-tap to perform one of its key features, liking and unliking a content item. I would not be surprised to see other apps integrate this shortcut in the near future.

An Interface That Fits

When designing an innovative mobile product, predicting user behavior can be very difficult. When we worked with Belgium’s Public Radio, my team really struggled with the UI balance between music visualization and real-time news. The sheer number of contextual scenarios and preferences made it very hard to come up with the perfect UI. So, we decided to integrate a simple dragging gesture to enable users to adjust the balance themselves.

By dragging, users can balance music-related content and live news.

This gesture adds a creative contextual dimension to the application. The dragging gesture does not take the user from one section (news or music) to another. Rather, it enables the user to focus on the type of content they are most interested in, without missing out on the other.

Think in Terms of Time, Dimension and Animation

What action is triggered when the user taps an item? And how do you visualize that it has actually happened? How fast does a particular UI element animate into the viewport? Does it automatically go off-screen after five seconds of no interaction?

The rise of touch and gesture-driven devices dramatically changes the way we design interaction. Instead of thinking in terms of screens and pages, we are thinking more in terms of time, dimension and animation. You’ve probably noticed that fine-tuning user interactions and demonstrating them to colleagues and clients with static wireframe screenshots is not easy. You don’t fully see, understand and feel what will happen when you touch, hold, drag and swipe items.

Certain prototyping tools, including Pop and Invision, can help bring wireframes to life. They are very useful for testing an application’s flow and for pinpointing where and when a user might get stuck. Your application has a lot more going on than simple back-and-forth navigation, so you need to detect interface bugs and potential sources of confusion as soon as possible. You wouldn’t want your development team to point them out to you now, would you?

Invision enables you to import and link your digital wireframes.

To be more innovative and experimental, get together with your client first and explain that a traditional wireframe is not the UX deliverable that they need. Show the value of interactive wireframes and encourage them to include this in the process. It might increase the timeline and budget, but if they are expecting you to go the extra mile, it shouldn’t be a problem.

I even offer to produce a conceptual interface video for my clients as well, because once they’ve worked with the interactive wireframes and sorted out the details, my clients will often need something sexier to present to their internal stakeholders.

The Learning Curve

When designing gesture-based interactions, be aware that every time you remove UI clutter, the application’s learning curve goes up. Without visual cues, users could get confused about how to interact with the application. A bit of exploration is no problem, but users should know where to begin. Many apps show a UI walkthrough when first launched, and I agree with Max Rudberg that walkthroughs should explain only the most important interactions. Don’t explain everything at once. If it’s too explicit and long, users will skip it.

Why not challenge yourself and gradually introduce creative UI hints as the user uses the application? This pattern is often referred to as progressive disclosure and is a great way to show only the information that is relevant to the user’s current activity. YouTube’s Capture application, for instance, tells the user to rotate the device to landscape orientation just as the user is about to open the camera for the first time.

Fight the learning curve with a UI walkthrough and/or visual hints.

Adding visual cues to the UI is not the only option. In the Sparrow app, the search bar appears for a few seconds, before animating upwards and going off screen, a subtle way to say that it’s waiting to be pulled down.

Stop Talking, Start Making

The iPhone ushered in a revolution in interactive communication. Only five years later, touchscreen devices are all around us, and interaction designers are redefining the ways people use digital content.

We need to explore and understand the potential of touch and gesture-based interfaces and start thinking more in terms of time, dimension and animation. As demonstrated by several innovative applications, gestures are a great way to make an app more content-focused, original and fun. And many gesture-based interactions that seem too experimental at first come to be seen as very intuitive.

For a complete overview of the opportunities for gestures on all major mobile platforms, check out Luke Wroblewski’s “Touch Gesture Reference Overview.” I hope you’re inspired to explore gesture-based interaction and intensify your adventures in mobile interfaces. Don’t be afraid to go the extra mile. With interactive wireframes, you can iterate your way to the best possible experience. So, let’s stop talking and start making.

(al)

© Thomas Joos for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

The post Beyond The Button: Embracing The Gesture-Driven Interface appeared first on rehavaPress.

A little background first: back in June, Twitter rolled out Twitter Cards, their name for the multimedia you sometimes see in expanded tweets on Twitter.com, Android, and iOS applications.

Fast forward to today: Twitter released the Lead Generation Card, a new type of Twitter Card that will allow marketers to collect leads directly within the tweet. Users don’t even have to fill out a form — since their information (Name, email, and username) is already pulled into the card. They literally just have to hit “Submit” on the Card’s call-to-action. For now, this is only available as a feature in Promoted Tweets — a paid feature of Twitter Ads. 

Here’s what it looks like, courtesy of the Twitter Advertising Blog:

So cool, right? We can think of tons of ways you could get the most out of this new feature … but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. First, let’s show you how to get Lead Generation Cards in the first place, then we’ll give you some marketing takeaways. 

How to Create Twitter Lead Generation Cards

Want to get set up a Lead Generation Card for one of your Promoted Tweets? Follow these steps:

1) Set up a CRM end point integration.

The first time you want to collect information through Twitter Cards, you’re going to need to set up an end point integration, which will allow you keep track of your Twitter leads from Lead Generation Cards within your CRM.

Twitter has a whole list of CRMs that will work with Lead Generation Cards — and if you’re using HubSpot as a CRM, we count, too. For more information on the end point setup, check out Twitter’s support article.

Once you have the CRM integration set up, you’re ready to start creating your Cards. Unlike creating other types of Twitter Cards, you won’t need to make changes to the HTML or CSS on your website for the Lead Generation Card to appear.

2) Create a new Card.

To start creating your Lead Generation Cards, you’ll need to go to the Twitter Advertising Interface, located in the drop-down menu in the top right corner of your homepage screen.

Once you’re in the Ads Interface, click “Advertising” in the top left, then select “Cards.”

Once you’re on that page, click the “Create New Card” button in the top right. 

3) Create content for the Card.

Once you’re in the New Card interface, you’ll need to select the content to be featured in the Lead Generation Card. Here’s what you’ll need:

• Card Image: Make sure to choose a compelling image that Twitter users can’t help but click on. Keep in mind it can’t be larger than 1 MB, maintains a minimum of a 4:1 aspect ratio, and is at least 600px wide. 
• Short Description: Include a sentence here about why your offer is so great. It’s just like your landing page title — short and punchy, yet descriptive. Remember, this can be no longer than 80 characters.
• Call-to-Action (CTA): Here, you can specify the text on the CTA button at the bottom of the Lead Generation Card. Make sure the text is action-oriented and tailor the language to the offer. For example, if you were promoting an ebook, you’d make the CTA text: “Download Ebook Here.”

4) Set Technical Settings

After you’ve decided what the Lead Generation Card will look like, you’ve got to make sure it actually works the way it’s supposed to in this section. Here’s what you need to fill out in the section:

• POST/GET Dropdown: This is how the information is sent from Twitter to your CRM. Typically, POST sends information to your server, while a GET retrieves it. If you’re not sure which to choose, check with your development team or a technology-fluent friend for a little guidance.
• Submit URL: This is the URL your leads are submitted to — it should be the endpoint to your CRM system.
• Fallback URL: If users click through on a Lead Generation Twitter Card on a non-supported platform, they will be taken to this link. It’s a good idea to make this a landing page so you still have another opportunity to convert the visitor into a lead.
• Privacy Policy URL: All Twitter Lead Generation Cards must include a link to your privacy policy so users can see what data is being collected and how it’s being used. According to Twitter, “The privacy policy must also be posted on the same page where the information is collected.” If you are collecting sensitive information (credit card or bank account numbers, for example), you must also have a secure server (https://).

After you’ve filled out the above information, you can customize the user information fields to match up with your CRM field. For example, Twitter may automatically label emails as “Email Address,” whereas you may label emails as “Email” in your CRM. To make sure the Twitter leads are properly registered and organized within your CRM, you should make sure to double check the key names here.

After you are done, you click “Create Card” and you are ready to start promoting your Lead Generation Card!

5) Run Campaign With the Lead Generation Card

Last, but certainly not least, you will need to run a campaign to get your Lead Generation Card in front of Twitter users and start collecting leads. Need help running a Twitter campaign? We have a basic guide to help you get started.

What Marketers Should Know

We’re really excited about this new feature — it’s a great way to connect Twitter ads with your bottom line through quality content. Besides being an awesome new way to collect leads, this new feature has a few implications for marketers:

In-app conversions could increase conversions rates.

With every click they have to make, more and more users drop out of the conversion process. By making it super easy for users to hit submit on a form (seriously, that’s all they have to do), many more people will be coming into the top of your marketing funnel. Though these leads may not be the same quality as those who fill out a longer form, you’ll be getting more leads in the door. The in-app conversion allows your content — and your ad dollars — to work harder for you.

Visuals are more important than ever.

I swear we sound like a broken record here, but it’s true — visual content is essential to your success on social media. In the Lead Generation Cards, you’ve got 240 characters (the tweet, description, and CTA) and an image to convert someone. That’s not a lot. If you aren’t making the most of your Lead Generation Cards, the larger conversion rates I mentioned above won’t happen, period. Don’t worry if you’re not a designer — you can easily create visual content in PowerPoint. 

Make these leads count with sweet lead nurturing campaigns.

The Lead Generation Cards don’t capture much information — just name, email, and Twitter handle. Can you really qualify the person as a lead with this information? Probably not. If you want to make sure your Twitter Ads efforts are paying off, you’ll need to start a lead nurturing campaign to get more information from your leads and work them down your marketing funnel.

Will you be using Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards in your inbound marketing strategy? Share your opinion with us in the comments!

Image credit: mkhmarketing

The post Twitter Introduces Lead Generation 'Cards' to Collect Leads From Tweets appeared first on rehavaPress.

And the people want benchmark data.

I broke down survey responses about customer generation through the lense of simple demographic information — B2B versus B2C, industry, company size, and company location. If you don’t see your business type or industry represented below, though, let us know — we did our best to grab as much data as we could, but we know we can always do more! I hope this helps you get a little bit of an understanding of where others in your space are with customer generation via different inbound marketing channels.

Part 1: Where do we get our customers?

Notable Findings: Taking a closer look at how primary sales channel affects where we get our customers, it looks like B2C companies dominate customer acquisition — 70% said they acquired a customer from a Facebook lead, for example. However, B2C companies do struggle to find customers through LinkedIn with only 22% responding that they did acquire a customer there. (I don’t think that finding is too shocking, though it’s encouraging that 22% of B2C companies do acquire customer there!) Conversely, B2B companies find a lot more customers through LinkedIn than B2C companies (53% vs. 22%). It is interesting to note that most business types had the same ability to acquire customers through a blog, around 40%-50%.

Notable Findings: With respect to industry, the Retail/Wholesale/Consumer Goods industry ranks the highest for acquiring a customer through Facebook with a ‘Yes’ response rate of 73%, while the Banking/Insurance/Financial Services industry struggles the most (only 33% of respondents said they acquired a customer through Facebook). As expected, marketing agencies do a phenomenal job of using LinkedIn for customer acquisition (58% ‘yes’ response rate) whereas the Retail/Wholesale/Consumer Goods industry only had a ‘Yes’ response rate of 19% for acquiring a customer through LinkedIn. The Technology (hardware) industry dominates customer acquisition through the company blog and Twitter — 55% said ‘Yes’ to acquiring a customer through their company blog, and 50% said ‘Yes’ to Twitter.

Notable Findings: Smaller companies have greater success than medium-size companies (who have greater success than larger companies) in terms of number of customers acquired through Facebook. Following the same pattern seen in Facebook customer acquisition, small companies have the highest rates of customer acquisition via the company blog versus medium- and large-size companies. Medium-size companies do the best on LinkedIn for customer acquisition, with 47% of respondents saying they had acquired a customer through this channel. Large companies have an extremely high rate of Twitter conversion with 60% of respondents.

Notable Findings: When comparing customer acquisition rates between the U.S. and the rest of the world, it appears that LinkedIn and Twitter are better channels for customer acquisition in the U.S. than abroad, whereas Facebook and Google+ are stronger conversion sources abroad than in the U.S.

Part 2: What is the average cost per customer?

Notable Findings:

• B2B has a higher cost per customer than B2C and B2B2C.
• The Banking/Insurance/Financial Services industry has the highest cost per customer ($303).
• The Retail/Wholesale/Consumer Goods industry has the lowest cost per customer ($22).
• Small and medium-size companies have similar costs per customer, but large companies have significantly higher costs ($425 versus $128/$150).
• LATAM has the lowest cost per customer ($49) whereas EMEA has the highest ($252) with the U.S. not lagging far behind ($184).

Part 3: What is the average percentage of leads your company converts to sales?

Notable Findings:

• B2B2C has a higher sales conversion rate than B2B or B2C.
• The Mining/Construction/Energy industry has the highest conversion rate (39%), followed by the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical industry (30%), and the Retail/Wholesale/Consumer Goods industry (29%).
• Small companies (27%) have higher sales conversion rates than medium- (24%) and large- (25%) size companies.
• The U.S. and LATAM have the highest sales conversion rates by region (26%), followed by APAC (25%) and EMEA (24%).

I hope this gives you a good start at understanding how other inbound marketers like you compare in terms of customer acquisition. And of course, leave ideas for what else you’d like to see more information about in the comments.

Is any of the data here surprising to you? What other benchmarking data would you like to see?

Image credit: Tsahi Levent-Levi

The post Where Do Marketers Get Customers? [Data] appeared first on rehavaPress.

If you haven’t yet flipped through Velocity Partners’ SlideShare deck, “Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge,” it’s definitely worth a look (we’ve embedded it below). It’s no wonder the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report revealed that 18% of marketers are making quality content their top priority this year.

The good news is, while it’s becoming harder and harder to get eyeballs on your content, the future is bright for marketers committed to quality. And because business blogging is one of the most effective ways for marketers to consistently deliver content to their audiences — and because it’s right in my wheelhouse as HubSpot’s blog manager — I thought I’d share with you what I think the future of business blogging holds.

No one ever said prediction posts had to be limited to Q4, after all. 

Content quality makes or breaks successful business blogs — and credible businesses. 

I’m starting with this one because we’re already starting to see it happen. In fact, it was the catalyst behind that Velocity Partners SlideShare (viewable below), and it’s why Google has made so many search algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin (the latest of which was just rolled out yesterday) to reward high-quality content and push crappy content to the bottom of the search results.

Businesses realize the need to build in-house content teams.

Companies that realize content creation is a must have historically employed a variety of different tactics to feed their business blogs — not just limited to internal resources. They may rely on agency resources, or they may outsource content creation to a freelancer. While these are great ways for businesses to develop content if they’re strapped for time, outsourcing content creation is far less likely to result in that high-quality content you should be striving for. Why? Because most agencies and freelancers aren’t specialized in your particular industry, and in order to create high-quality content, you need the expertise and insights of the people who know your industry well. People like … your internal team. 

As a result, marketing teams will realize the importance of internal content creators — people with writing chops and industry knowledge. According to the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing, only 9% of companies employ a full-time blogger, but I bet we’ll see this percentage grow in the coming years. As marketing teams take steps to cultivate a content culture, we’ll also see traditional marketers by trade hone their writing skills at the risk of getting left behind. And while blogging has long been considered an entry-level role or a part-time gig, we’ll watch as seasoned, classically trained writers and journalists gravitate toward business’ content teams. As a result … 

Businesses increase content variety and start publishing more op-ed-style content.

As businesses grow their internal content teams and start treating them as internal publishing houses, not only will we start to see content quality increase — we’ll also see a surge in content variety. Businesses that build an in-house news operation will have more skilled writers on hand, and the recent trend of veteran journalists jumping ship and joining companies’ internal content teams will become even more commonplace. Consider Michelle Kessler of USA Today (now at Qualcomm), Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek (now at IBM), and Rafe Needleman of CNET (now at Evernote), and Brian Caulfield of Forbes (now at NVIDIA) — all of whom have already made the shift. This will result in more sophisticated, op-ed-style content as well as more diversified content in general. We’ll see less and less of the easy-to-create blog posts like curated lists, and more and more thought leadership pieces, op-ed-like stories, and occasional content that’s mainly entertaining in nature (albeit on-brand). 

Marketers use their blogs for more than just attracting visitors at the top of the funnel and generating new leads.

Historically, business blogs have been hailed as a powerful top-of-the-funnel tool for attracting new visitors through channels such as search engines and social networks. It’s also been recognized as an excellent, low-cost new lead driver; according to our Marketing Benchmarks report, companies that increase blogging from 3-5x/month to just 6-8x/month almost double their leads. This won’t change, but marketers will realize their blog’s readership is made up of more than just brand new site visitors — leads and customers are also following their blog. And with recent marketing technology advancements like dynamic, or “Smart” content, marketers will also start to understand their blog’s role in the rest of the inbound marketing methodology — not just in the ‘Attract’ and ‘Convert’ stages, but also in the ‘Close’ and ‘Delight’ stages. Realizing their blog is something of an inbound marketing Swiss army knife, marketers will be smarter about leveraging these technologies and tactics to use their blog to nurture existing leads and delight current customers, too — without alienating any one type of visitor or lifecycle stage.

Marketers reconsider the metrics their blog is measured by. 

As marketers start treating their business blogs as in-house news publications — and as they start to optimize for its other use cases in the middle and bottom of the funnel, they’ll realize the limitations of traditional blog performance indicators like traffic and inbound links. As a result, more marketers will start to measure the ROI of their blogging efforts using closed-loop analytics — to understand their blog’s impact on lead generation and customer acquisition and tie their business blogging efforts to the bottom line. 

Moreover, marketers will add some other critical metrics to the mix. Engagement metrics like new audience growth, retention, and subscriber churn will become increasingly important measures of business blogging success as marketers look to grow the reach of their blog while also retaining current readership. 

Blogs get smart.

As businesses start investing more time in content creation and, thus, publishing more and more content, content discovery will become a much bigger priority. Marketers will seek to extend the shelf-life of the blog content they put so much time into creating, get more mileage out of evergreen content, surface the right content to the right visitors, and increase the stickiness of their blog to keep readers around for longer (and beef up those retention metrics). As more and more marketers buy into “the age of context,” realizing the importance of context and how it can strengthen the entire marketing funnel, marketers will also recognize the need to create a much more personalized, dynamic experience for their readers. 

Since most blog designs today (yes — including this one) mainly serve up content in chronological order and are to some degree static, marketers will turn to the design and layout of their blogs as a solution. And with the increase in blogging adoption, technologies will continue to emerge to enable smarter blog content. This will result in richer, more personalized and dynamic blog designs that cater to visitors on an individual basis, automatically displaying and recommending the content that interests them at that time rather than organized in chronological order. Blog designs will also have an increased focus on improving user experience, taking into consideration and optimizing for how readers navigate, scroll through, and look for the content that’s important to them – not just what was published most recently. 

Marketers finally invest in their blog’s mobile experience.

While mobile optimization has gained traction among marketers over the past couple years, most marketers are only just scratching the surface. And although having a mobile-friendly blog and website has become a ‘must have’ for marketers, mobile friendliness will no longer be enough. With comScore reporting that 4 out of every 5 minutes spent using mobile media are spent within apps, marketers will realize the need for mobile versions of their blog — built specifically for the mobile experience. 

As a result, we’ll start to see marketers double down on their investment in their blog’s mobile experience, turning to platforms like the Apple Newsstand, the Kindle App store, and other mobile applications like Flipboard to deliver magazine-like versions of their blog content and give their audiences unique and truly mobile-optimized experiences. 

Comments become much more useful.

Unless you’re Seth Godin, we can all probably agree that blog comments are a necessary feature of any blog. They foster engagement with readers, facilitate interesting discussions, and generally make your blog more social. But aside from that, there’s not really much else going for them. They’re difficult to measure, they exist in a vacuum, they get raided by spammers, and the truly insightful commenters are often overshadowed by nasty trolls and thoughtless readers leaving superficial sentiments. While a few technologies like Facebook’s Comments Box have emerged in an attempt to make comments more social and integrated with other platforms, comment engines have yet to be perfected.

But as marketing technologies continue to develop, comment engines will get much more sophisticated, integrated, measurable … and valuable. Not only will they pull in conversations already happening in social media, but they’ll also incorporate Social Inbox-like features, connecting with marketers’ contacts databases to identify whether a commenter is a new visitor, a lead in their database, or a customer — and have analytics to go with them. As a result, marketers will be able to personalize their responses and make comments a much more useful tool — for themselves, their sales teams, and for their readers.

Blogs become THE place to market your business.

Today, marketers are still investing a lot of resources into search engines and online advertising. The problem is, none of these channels are assets owned by the marketer, and they largely depend on “borrowed” audiences and paid media. But as more and more marketers commit to content, they’ll realize the limitations of relying on third parties, the power of marketing their business on a channel they own, and the control that comes with it. Unlike a media outlet building reader trust, then trying to leverage that trust in order to generate clicks on brands’ ads, marketers will realize they can cut out the middle man, build trust directly with their audience, and market to them more cost-effectively and authentically through their own blogs.

As a result, the blog will become THE place to market a business. It will become the center of marketers’ content universes, and lead to a wave of marketers who treat their blogs like a business in and of itself — using other reliable marketing tools and channels like social media, email, SEO, and analytics to support and promote its growth. ‘Blog marketing’ will take on a completely new meaning … for the better.

Image Credit: Alan Cleaver

The post What the Future Holds for Business Blogging appeared first on rehavaPress.

  

When the mockups for the new Financial Times application hit our desks in mid-2012, we knew we had a real challenge on our hands. Many of us on the team (including me) swore that parts of interface would not be possible in HTML5. Given the product team’s passion for the new UI, we rolled up our sleeves and gave it our best shot.

We were tasked with implementing a far more challenging product, without compromising the reliable, performant experience that made the first app so successful.

We didn’t just want to build a product that fulfilled its current requirements; we wanted to build a foundation that we could innovate on in the future. This meant building with a maintenance-first mentality, writing clean, well-commented code and, at the same time, ensuring that our code could accommodate the demands of an ever-changing feature set.

In this article, I’ll discuss some of the changes we made in the latest release and the decision-making behind them. I hope you will come away with some ideas and learn from our solutions as well as our mistakes.

Supported Devices

The first Financial Times Web app ran on iPad and iPhone in the browser, and it shipped in a native (PhoneGap-esque) application wrapper for Android and Windows 8 Metro devices. The latest Web app is currently being served to iPad devices only; but as support is built in and tested, it will be rolled out to all existing supported platforms. HTML5 gives developers the advantage of occupying almost any mobile platform. With 2013 promising the launch of several new Web application marketplaces (eg. Chrome Web Store and Mozilla Marketplace), we are excited by the possibilities that lie ahead for the mobile Web.

Fixed-Height Layouts

The first shock that came from the new mockups was that they were all fixed height. By “fixed height,” I mean that, unlike a conventional website, the height of the page is restricted to the height of the device’s viewport. If there is more content than there is screen space, overflow must be dealt with at a component level, as opposed to the page level. We wanted to use JavaScript only as a last resort, so the first tool that sprang to mind was flexbox. Flexbox gives developers the ability to declare flexible elements that can fill the available horizontal or vertical space, something that has been very tricky to do with CSS. Chris Coyier has a great introduction to flexbox.

Using Flexbox in Production

Flexbox has been around since 2009 and has great support on all the popular smartphones and tablets. We jumped at the chance to use flexbox when we found out how easily it could solve some of our complex layouts, and we started throwing it at every layout problem we faced. As the app began to grow, we found performance was getting worse and worse.

We spent a good few hours in Chrome Developers Tools’ timeline and found the culprit: Shock, horror! — it was our new best friend, flexbox. The timeline showed that some layouts were taking close to 100 milliseconds; reworking our layouts without flexbox reduced this to 10 milliseconds! This may not seem like a lot, but when swiping between sections, 90 milliseconds of unresponsiveness is very noticeable.

Back to the Old School

We had no other choice but to tear out flexbox wherever we could. We used 100% height, floats, negative margins, border-box sizing and padding to achieve the same layouts with much greater performance (albeit with more complex CSS). Flexbox is still used in some parts of the app. We found that its impact on performance was less expensive when used for small UI components.

Page layout time with flexbox

Page layout time without flexbox

Truncation

The content of a fixed-height layout will rarely fit its container; eventually it has to overflow. Traditionally in print, designers have used ellipses (three dots) to solve this problem; however, on the Web, this isn’t the simplest technique to implement.

Ellipsis

You might be familiar with the text-overflow: ellipsis declaration in CSS. It works great, has awesome browser support, but has one shortfall: it can’t be used for text that spans multiple lines. We needed a solution that would insert an ellipsis at the point where the paragraph overflows its container. JavaScript had to step in.

Ellipsis truncation is used throughout.

After an in-depth research and exploration of several different approaches, we created our FTEllipsis library. In essence, it measures the available height of the container, then measures the height of each child element. When it finds the child element that overflows the container, it caps its height to a sensible number of lines. For WebKit-based browsers, we use the little-known -webkit-line-clamp property to truncate an element’s text by a set number of lines. For non-WebKit browsers, the library allows the developer to style the overflowing container however they wish using regular CSS.

Modularization

Having tackled some of the low-level visual challenges, we needed to step back and decide on the best way to manage our application’s views. We wanted to be able to reuse small parts of our views in different contexts and find a way to architect rock-solid styling that wouldn’t leak between components.

One of the best decisions we made in implementing the new application was to modularize the views. This started when we were first looking over the designs. We scribbled over printouts, breaking the page down into chunks (or modules). Our plan was to identify all of the possible layouts and modules, and define each view (or page) as a combination of modules sitting inside the slots of a single layout.

Each module needed to be named, but we found it very hard to describe a module, especially when some modules could have multiple appearances depending on screen size or context. As a result, we abandoned semantic naming and decided to name each component after a type of fruit — no more time wasted thinking up sensible, unambiguous names!

An example of a module’s markup:

<div class="apple">
  <h2 class="apple_headline">{{headline}}</h2>
  <h3 class="apple_sub-head">{{subhead}}</h3>
  <div class="apple_body">{{body}}</div>
</div>

An example of a module’s styling:

.apple {}

.apple_headline {
  font-size: 40px;
}

.apple_sub-head {
  font-size: 20px;
}

.apple_body {
  font-size: 14px;
  column-count: 2;
  color: #333;
}

Notice how each class is prefixed with the module’s name. This ensures that the styling for one component will never affect another; every module’s styling is encapsulated. Also, notice how we use just one class in our CSS selectors; this makes our component transportable. Ridding selectors of any ancestral context means that modules may be dropped anywhere in our application and will look the same. This is all imperative if we want to be able to reuse components throughout the application (and even across applications).

What If a Module Needs Interactions?

Each module (or fruit) has its own markup and style, which we wrote in such a way that it can be reused. But what if we need a module to respond to interactions or events? We need a way to bring the component to life, but still ensure that it is unbound from context so that it can be reused in different places. This is a little trickier that just writing smart markup and styling. To solve this problem, we wrote FruitMachine.

Reusable Components

FruitMachine is a lightweight library that assembles our layout’s components and enables us to declare interactions on a per-module basis. It was inspired by the simplicity of Backbone views, but with a little more structure to keep “boilerplate” code to a minimum. FruitMachine gives our team a consistent way to work with views, while at the same time remaining relatively unopinionated so that it can be used in almost any view.

The Component Mentality

Thinking about your application as a collection of standalone components changes the way you approach problems. Components need to be dumb; they can’t know anything of their context or of the consequences of any interactions that may occur within them. They can have a public API and should emit events when they are interacted with. An application-specific controller assembles each layout and is the brain behind everything. Its job is to create, control and listen to each component in the view.

For example, to show a popover when a component named “button” is clicked, we would not hardcode this logic into the button component. Instead “button” would emit a buttonclicked event on itself every time its button is clicked; the view controller would listen for this event and then show the popover. By working like this, we can create a large collection of components that can be reused in many different contexts. A view component may not have any application-specific dependencies if it is to be used across projects.

Working like this has simplified our architecture considerably. Breaking down our views into components and decoupling them from our application focuses our decision-making and moves us away from baking complex, heavily dependent modules into our application.

The Future of FruitMachine

FruitMachine was our solution to achieve fully transportable view components. It enables us to quickly define and assemble views with minimal effort. We are currently using FruitMachine only on the client, but server-side (NodeJS) usage has been considered throughout development. In the coming months, we hope to move towards producing server-side-rendered websites that progressively enhance into a rich app experience.

You can find out more about FruitMachine and check out some more examples in the public GitHub repository.

Retina Support

The Financial Times’ first Web app was released before the age of “Retina” screens. We retrofitted some high-resolution solutions, but never went the whole hog. For our designers, 100% Retina support was a must-have in the new application. We developers were sick of maintaining multiple sizes and resolutions of each tiny image within the UI, so a single vector-based solution seemed like the best approach. We ended up choosing icon fonts to replace our old PNGs, and because they are implemented just like any other custom font, they are really well supported. SVG graphics were considered, but after finding a lack of support in Android 2.3 and below, this option was ruled out. Plus, there is something nice about having all of your icons bundled up in a single file, whilst not sacrificing the individuality of each graphic (like sprites).

Our first move was to replace the Financial Times’ logo image with a single glyph in our own custom icon font. A font glyph may be any color and size, and it always looks super-sharp and is usually lighter in weight than the original image. Once we had proved it could work, we began replacing every UI image and icon with an icon font alternative. Now, the only pixel-based image in our CSS is the full-color logo on the splash screen. We used the powerful but rather archaic-looking FontForge to achieve this.

Once past the installation phase, you can open any font file in FontForge and individually change the vector shape of any character. We imported SVG vector shapes (created in Adobe Illustrator) into suitable character slots of our font and exported as WOFF and TTF font types. A combination of WOFF and TTF file formats are required to support iOS, Android and Windows devices, although we hope to rely only on WOFFs once Android gains support (plus, WOFFs are around 25% smaller in file size than TTFs).

The Financial Times’ icon font in Font Forge

Images

Article images are crucial for user engagement. Our images are delivered as double-resolution JPEGs so that they look sharp on Retina screens. Our image service (running ImageMagick) outputs JPEGs at the lowest possible quality level without causing noticeable degradation (we use 35 for Retina devices and 70 for non-Retina). Scaling down retina size images in the browser enables us to reduce JPEG quality to a lower level than would otherwise be possible without compression artifacts becoming noticeable. This article explains this technique in more detail.

It’s worth noting that this technique does require the browser to work a little harder. In old browsers, the work of scaling down many large images could have a noticeable impact on performance, but we haven’t encountered any serious problems.

Native-Like Scrolling

Like almost any application, we require full-page and subcomponent scrolling in order to manage all of the content we want to show our users. On desktop, we can make use of the well-established overflow CSS property. When dealing with the mobile Web, this isn’t so straightforward. We require a single solution that provides a “momentum” scrolling experience across all of the devices we support.

overflow: scroll

The overflow: scroll declaration is becoming usable on the mobile Web. Android and iOS now support it, but only since Android 3.0 and iOS 5. IOS 5 came with the exciting new -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch property, which allows for native momentum-like scrolling in the browser. Both of these options have their limitations.

Standard overflow: scroll and overflow: auto don’t display scroll bars as users might expect, and they don’t have the momentum touch-scrolling feel that users have become accustomed to from their native apps. The -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch declaration does add momentum scrolling and scroll bars, but it doesn’t allow developers to style the scroll bars in any way, and has limited support (iOS 5+ and Chrome on Android).

A Consistent Experience

Fragmented support and an inconsistent feel forced us to turn to JavaScript. Our first implementation used the TouchScroll library. This solution met our needs, but as our list of supported devices grew and as more complex scrolling interactions were required, working with it became trickier. TouchScroll lacks IE 10 support, and its API interface is difficult to work with. We also tried Scrollability and Zynga Scroller, neither of which have the features, performance or cross-browser capability we were looking for. Out of this problem, FTScroller was developed: a high-performance, momentum-scrolling library with support for iOS, Android, Playbook and IE 10.

FTScroller

FTScroller’s scrolling implementation is similar to TouchScroll’s, with a flexible API much like Zynga Scroller. We added some enhancements, such as CSS bezier curves for bouncing, requestAnimationFrame for smoother frame rates, and support for IE 10. The advantage of writing our own solution is that we could develop a product that exactly meets our requirements. When you know the code base inside out, fixing bugs and adding features is a lot simpler.

FTScroller is dead simple to use. Just pass in the element that will wrap the overflowing content, and FTScroller will implement horizontal or vertical scrolling as and when needed. Many other options may be declared in an object as the second argument, for more custom requirements. We use FTScroller throughout the Financial Times’ Web app for a consistent cross-platform scrolling experience.

A simple example:

var container = document.getElementById('scrollcontainer');
var scroller = new FTScroller(container);

The Gallery

The part of our application that holds and animates the page views is known as the “gallery.” It consists of three divisions: left, center and right. The page that is currently in view is located in the center pane. The previous page is positioned off screen in the left-hand pane, and the next page is positioned off screen in the right-hand pane. When the user swipes to the next page, we use CSS transitions to animate the three panes to the left, revealing the hidden right pane. When the transition has finished, the right pane becomes the center pane, and the far-left pane skips over to become the right pane. By using only three page containers, we keep the DOM light, while still creating the illusion of infinite pages.

Infinite scrolling made possible with a three-pane gallery

Making It All Work Offline

Not many Web apps currently offer an offline experience, and there’s a good reason for that: implementing it is a bloody pain! The application cache (AppCache) at first glance appears to be the answer to all offline problems, but dig a little deeper and stuff gets nasty. Talks by Andrew Betts and Jake Archibald explain really well the problems you will encounter. Unfortunately, AppCache is currently the only way to achieve offline support, so we have to work around its many deficiencies.

Our approach to offline is to store as little in the AppCache as possible. We use it for fonts, the favicon and one or two UI images — things that we know will rarely or never need updating. Our JavaScript, CSS and templates live in LocalStorage. This approach gives us complete control over serving and updating the most crucial parts of our application. When the application starts, the bare minimum required to get the app up and running is sent down the wire, embedded in a single HTML page; we call this the preload.

We show a splash screen, and behind the scenes we make a request for the application’s full resources. This request returns a big JSON object containing our JavaScript, CSS and Mustache templates. We eval the JavaScript and inject the CSS into the DOM, and then the application launches. This “bootstrap” JSON is then stored in LocalStorage, ready to be used when the app is next started up.

On subsequent startups, we always use the JSON from LocalStorage and then check for resource updates in the background. If an update is found, we download the latest JSON object and replace the existing one in LocalStorage. Then, the next time the app starts, it launches with the new assets. If the app is launched offline, the startup process is the same, except that we cannot make the request for resource updates.

Images

Managing offline images is currently not as easy as it should be. Our image requests are run through a custom image loader and cached in the local database (IndexedDB or WebSQL) so that the images can be loaded when a network connection is not present. We never load images in the conventional way, otherwise they would break when users are offline.

Our image-loading process:

1. The loader scans the page for image placeholders declared by a particular class.
2. It takes the src attribute of each image placeholder found and requests the source from our JavaScript image-loader library.
3. The local database is checked for each image. Failing that, a single HTTP request is made listing all missing images.
4. A JSON array of Base64-encoded images is returned from the HTTP response and stored separately in the local database.
5. A callback is fired for each image request, passing the Base64 string as an argument.
6. An <img> element is created, and its src attribute is set to the Base64 data-URI string.
7. The image is faded in.

I should also mention that we compress our Base64-encoded image strings in order to fit as many images in the database as possible. My colleague Andrew Betts goes into detail on how this can be achieved.

In some cases, we use this cool trick to handle images that fail to load:

<img src="image.jpg" onerror="this.style.display='none';" />

Ever-Evolving Applications

In order to stay competitive, a digital product needs to evolve, and as developers, we need to be prepared for this. When the request for a redesign landed at the Financial Times, we already had a fast, popular, feature-rich application, but it wasn’t built for change. At the time, we were able to implement small changes to features, but implementing anything big became a slow process and often introduced a lot of unrelated regressions.

Our application was drastically reworked to make the new requirements possible, and this took a lot of time. Having made this investment, we hope the new application not only meets (and even exceeds) the standard of the first product, but gives us a platform on which we can develop faster and more flexibly in the future.

(al)

© Wilson Page for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

The post Building The New Financial Times Web App: A Case Study appeared first on rehavaPress.

Shel Israel writes The Social Beat blog column at Forbes.com and has authored four books about digital media’s impact on business. He’s now working on his fifth book, 

I got a chance to catch up with Israel to talk about the latest trends in marketing: context, personalization, and the debate over tracking cookies. Here’s what he said.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about your upcoming book, The Age of Context? What are some examples of “context” we already see around us?

A. We look at five converging technology forces: mobile, social media, data, sensors, and location. As we see it, they are creating a huge contextual superforce in which technology becomes far more personal and capable of predicting what we want even before we ask.

The book has more than 100 examples, even though we are only at the dawn of this new age. We talk about how sensors will adjust traffic lights in real-time response to accidents or events like concerts, and how first responders can wear Google Glass or another smart eyewear device so that they understand where injured people or hazardous material is located in a burning building. 

We write about how retailers will use sensors and data to offer real-time rewards when a shopper touches an item, and talk about a new personalized guide that will select programs, movies, and sports events based on your preference and the channels in your cable plan. 

We also discuss how the New England Patriots are leading the NFL into an era when contextual technology allows in-stadium fans to have cold beers waiting for them at the moment they need them in the nearest concession stand. 

We explore avenues such as business, health, education, and a great deal more that shows how the life and work of almost everyone is about to change — hopefully for the better.

Q. The debate over third-party cookies is getting kind of heated. I understand why people want to shut off cookies and get rid of annoying advertising. But I wonder if we might go too far, and if perhaps we’ll lose the ability to deliver useful, relevant, targeted and contextual content. What do you think? 

A. Cookies are definitely a trade-off. They allow businesses to do all sorts of good stuff by knowing about each user. But they feel sneaky and make users very nervous about the data being collected. Take that anxiety and combine it with the frustration that the advertising is most often irrelevant to our interests, and it makes sense why people vilify cookies today.

I think you are right. If we just turn cookies off, we’ll lose something. Still, I think users should have the right to opt in whenever they possibly can — it’s very different from opting out. Users may make the wrong choice, but it’s their wrong choice to make.

Q. Some people are saying that cookies are old-fashioned and will die off, and then we’ll find new ways to track users and deliver better content. What are your thoughts along those lines?

A. All technologies age, and right now it’s happening at an accelerated pace. I don’t know of anything that can replace cookies today, but I’d be happy to see a less insidious technology. That being said, trying to ban cookies and stop tracking users altogether isn’t going to happen. Cookie-haters who try to win the fight this way are like people standing on a beach and trying to stop a tsunami rolling in. First, there’s no way you’ll succeed, and second, you’ll be in very deep and troubling waters really quickly.

As far as better advertising, I have a mere glimmer of hope that contextual technologies can make a difference. Cookies tell advertisers what we want at a time when we need it. But there is no technology to get them to stop when we no longer need something — nor is there a financial incentive. 

For example, one Sunday afternoon in January, I shopped around online for a hotel on Cape Cod in June. I made my selection a couple of hours later, booked my car and flight, and was done with the issue. A day has not gone by since then when I haven’t received special offers for hotels on Cape Cod. Advertisers do this all the time. It pisses people off. It hurts the credibility of otherwise decent brands. But the ad folk themselves really have no reason to stop sending me those offers. I’ll probably grow old and die, and still these offers will be sent to the online remnants of me.

Q. In the “age of context” how will brands learn about customers and deliver information that they will find useful rather than annoying?

A. In the coming age, our personal data, location, and likes will be known, which will help influence the scenarios I mentioned in my first answer. Our book doesn’t deal with one factor — time. It’s the fourth dimension. There is a time when I want to see deals on a new car, refrigerator, or Cape Cod holiday package. And then there comes a time when I don’t — I’ve already made a decision or purchase. A huge step is for advertisers to understand and measure the loss of goodwill that occurs when they produce more noise than signal across all communications channels. 

If you take it further, contextual ads can someday customize what each household sees on TV. They can even personalize the content you see on the screen in the back of a taxi. The first step, however, faces the biggest barrier: an industry that doesn’t understand that doing what they have always done will not remain effective.

Advertisers are in a cold war with the people they are trying to reach. They make TV ads noisier — we invent the mute button. They stick in more ads — we get a fast forward button. This isn’t the way to build a trusted relationship. 

What do you think the Age of Context looks like, given the recent cookie tracking debate? Share your predictions with us in the comments below. 

The post The Future of Inbound: Shel Israel Looks Ahead to the 'Age of Context' appeared first on rehavaPress.

Me: Hey Sam! Thanks for talking with me. You just got back from a vacation, so I know you’re probably quite busy catching up on stuff. Where’d you go?

Sam: Hey Corey! Took a cruise to the Bahamas. I needed the laws of physics to separate me from my phone.

Me: Haha yeah, sooo, that’s the reason I wanted to talk to you today. I’ve known you for about a year and a half, but it only takes like … a day … to know you are a social media/internet junkie. How much anxiety did you have over leaving the internet behind for a week?

Sam: A fair bit. Actually, a lot. I’ve jumped out of airplanes with less anxiety.

Me: What made you so anxious?

Sam: Mostly just worry/concern. For example, I wasn’t able to confirm with my parents that they understood I was going to be unreachable (they take AGES to answer text messages — like 24 whole hours can pass). But also, I didn’t want to miss anything interesting. I follow some awesome people on Twitter. I get a lot of emails. It’s just been a long time since I’ve completely separated myself from my phone.

Me: So some of the anxiety was around FOMO (a term I just learned, “Fear of Missing Out”)?

Sam: Heh, that’s an interesting acronym. That’s definitely part of it. I think it’s also partially that the user interfaces of social media play on the innate addictions we’re all prone to. Not to go too sciencey, but we all get just a tiny bit of excitement when someone sends us a tweet or we see that little red number on Facebook. It’s a frequent but small trigger that creates a dopamine response; that is what makes it so addictive. It’s why playing slots can be more addictive than the lottery — there are frequent small rewards that bring us a bit of happiness. Ironically, as someone who knows about how user interfaces are built for this, I’m incredibly succeptible to it.

Me: No by all means, get sciencey. You’re right. And people are starting to profit off this stuff, too. Did you know there’s some camp out in … somewhere I can’t remember right now … but they charge like 10K for people to go there for FOUR DAYS and just … not be on the internet. That’s the whole business model. It’s like internet rehab. So maybe you could consider internet rehab?

Sam: Haha well that’s a bit much. I think for that amount I could just toss my laptop and phone into The Charles for some catharsis and buy a new one.

Me: Which did you have more anxiety over leaving — email, or social media?

Sam: Email I think. People on social media don’t usually send me anything work related so it’s rarely SUPER urgent. Although resisting the urge to check my Facebook notifications was tough, too.

Me:  Interesting. Kinda expected you to say social media.

Sam:  Why?

Me: Because I know for you, your social media presence kind of IS your work to an extent. You got your job here largely through social media and your ability to garner attention there using inbound tactics. Kind of a good tie in for us at HubSpot. Plus you have a personal brand you’ve built up through social media — I mean, you even get free samosas through social media.

Sam: Haha yeah. I love social media, so that’s hard, too. Don’t get me wrong. I was worried about Twitter because I try REALLY hard to answer every single tweet I get and I didn’t want people to think I was ignoring them.

Me: Well let’s talk about why email was harder to leave behind. Were you concerned you’d get back to work and just be really behind, or was it more concern about losing ground and missing out on opportunities?

Sam: It was FOMO. Fear of missing out. For example, we launched our new social inbox tool while I was gone and I didn’t have the resources to deploy my campaign around it, so I promoted it to our ecommerce community a full week later than everyone else.

Me: And what about what it felt like to leave behind social media, versus what it was like when you got back. Did you lose ground? Were people like, where is Sam? Why isn’t he responding? Why isn’t he tweeting (did you autoschedule?) Did you see follower churn? In other words … was your anxiety about leaving social media justified?

Sam: My follower growth definitely stagnated, but I didn’t lose much ground. I did have to go through and cancel all of my automated tweets. I’m scheduled to shamelessly promote my new book daily. I’ve always joked that it’d be weird if anything unfortunate ever happened to me because I’d keep tweeting for months. As a marketer, I try to create consistency for people. So when I got back I ramped up publishing volume slowly, so it wasn’t just a sudden deluge of content. All in all though, it wasn’t that bad, and my anxiety probably could have been quelled had I known that.

Me: So you think marketers and social media managers out there can probably go on vacation for a week and largely chill, and things will be alright? (Readers, feel free to send this to your boss if he says yes.)

Sam: That depends. You said I have a bit of a personal brand on social media, but fundamentally, I’m not a “real” brand. People expect brands to answer quickly. I’m not sure if I’d ever be okay leaving the HubSpot account unmonitored for more than a day, for example.

Me: Yeah, it seems like people are more forgiving of a person going off the grid for a week. A brand? It’s powered by people, but those people can’t leave. I guess people versus person is the operative distinction there, though. Brands are expected to have failsafes in place.

Sam: Totes. There’s an accountability for a company that an individual doesn’t have to have. People are more forgiving when, for example, I post the occasional drunk tweet. HubSpot as a company could never get away with that.

Me: Haha, I wonder what the sprocket would say if it got drunk. So, did you ever get to a point where you were glad you were disconnected? Where you lost the anxiety?

Sam: Yeah I got over it fast. Within a few days I was fine. Although I did cheat my last day of vacation; I checked my Facebook and did some Pinning .

Me: Good gravy, thank you for being a proud Pinterest user and a dude. It’s not just for ladies, right?

Sam: I love Pinterest. I have my “Things I Wanna Build” board which is ideas for my blacksmithing and woodworking hobbies. I also have an awesome “Zombie Apocalypse Survival” board. Pinterest is also super practical; Jen and I have a board we use as our “Queue” like you might have on Netflix, but we use it to plan our healthy meals for each week!

Me: I know, whenever my boyfriend gives me grief about using Pinterest, I tell him every good meal I’ve made for him wouldn’t exist without it. Anyway, did you feel actively BETTER after a couple days on internet hiatus? Or did you just generally forget about it?

Sam: I definitely did feel better, yes. Every once in awhile you have to unplug. Even an addict like me. And I actually came up with some great content ideas while I was doing it, too!

Me: So is this experience going to change your approach to/reliance on/obsession with being constantly digitally connected?

Sam: Haha, well … no, not really. It was more of just a deep breath. I need to be engaged on Twitter, for my personal brand and for HubSpot. I need to be monitoring and reacting to what people tweet, as well as focusing on creating interesting content to share. Facebook is more of a personal thing for me — I’m trying to fight the urge to start arguing on Facebook again. This used to be me:

Me: Amazing. I’ve also been in conversations with you while you’re doing this, so at least you’re self-aware Alright, so, what you’re saying is (if I may put words in your mouth), that breathers are good. Be present in whatever you’re doing, whether it’s arguing on the internet, or being on vacation, or whatever. #SoProfound

Sam: #SoundsDeep

Me: Whatever, might as well end deep. Anyway, thanks for chatting with me Sam! Welcome home, glad you’re back. Boston was a sad, tweetless place without you.

Sam: You’re welcome! Glad I’m back and connected again.

How do you deal with the difficulty of disconnecting in this digital world? Do you handle personal and work-related digital activities differently?

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In a recent survey of 511 predominantly B2B sales reps and executives published on A Sales Guy Consulting, approximately 22% of salespeople claimed they didn’t use social media to close deals, while an overwhelming 78.3% said they had used social media to sell.

Are you, or someone you know, part of the 22%? If so, it could be impacting your career, your business, and your paycheck. But there’s good news — there’s still time to join the 78%! Allow me to try to make the case for you (and feel free to co-opt any of this if you’d like to make this case for a 22%-er yourself.)

Why Social Media’s Value Is on the Upswing

We live in a world where open communication and transparency are not just options, but near addictions. When it comes to social media, many people have fallen victim to digital exhibitionism. We post how we feel about our meals, our friends, the services we use, and our views on just about anything. With this kind of unfiltered, raw personal insight flowing constantly through the arteries of social media, now is the time for salespeople to keep their fingers, quite literally, on the pulse of the marketplace through social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning of the social media era, this kind of personal data simply wasn’t around. There were less people talking, sharing, and establishing relationships over social media. It’s taken some time for the B2B market to join the social media conversation, but there’s no denying that the data overwhelmingly suggests that industries have evolved and adopted these practices. In 2013, 43% of surveyed marketers said they had found a customer through LinkedIn. Similarly, 56% of B2B marketers plan to increase their social media spend in 2013.

Now that adoption has ramped up, it’s time to respond. Not just in Marketing, but in Sales, too.

Why Should Sales Adopt a Social Media Strategy?

Because your future customers are on social media!

Remember back when businesses would advertise in the Yellow Pages? Someone might look up “Law Firm,” call for a quote for their services, and the firm would answer when people called. In the digital age, it’s not so different. People “call” us in a lot of different ways — on the phone, via our website, on email, even in search engines. And when they do, we do our best to “call” them back, whether through nurturing materials, an email, or an actual phone call.

Now answer me this. If you got a “call” through social media … would you return it?

If your answer is anything other than of course, you might be in the 22%. For some time now, social media has been the voicemail box we just haven’t been checking. With growing adoption of social media, there are more and more messages being sent over social that you should be doing your darndest to pick up on. And if you’re not checking the messages, someone else will. 72.6% of salespeople using social media actually outperformed their colleagues not on social media. Don’t let the salesperson outperforming you be from your competitor.

(Tip: The value of social media in the sales process extends beyond just being present where leads are communicating. It has to do with the soft skills many sales professionals have already honed in-person and on the phone. Any sales professional knows it’s extremely important to develop a sense of comfort and trust early on in a relationship. Social media can be the perfect medium for engaging in those conversations that will help you better understand your lead’s pain points, interests, and personality. In a world where we text before we call, the domain of sales conversations is expanding from the headset into the Twitter stream.)

What Sales Reps Could Be Doing TODAY to Leverage Social Media

So how exactly does a salesperson get involved in an effective social media strategy? The first steps are knowing which messages to search for, who the most important people to look for are, and how to best respond to individual messages. Here’s how you (or that friend of yours in the 22%) could get started immediately with being a social seller.

Monitor Your Company and Industry Keywords

Regularly monitoring mentions of target keywords (often the same ones Marketing uses to optimize their content) and mentions of your company on social media platforms like Twitter can help to identify those leads who are looking for a service like yours. You might even find leads making direct comparisons between you and your competitors. This is the perfect opportunity to lend a helpful hand and reach out to those people who are asking sales-centric questions.

Monitor Your Leads

Even salespeople who are already on social media often find it difficult to uncover messages from those leads who matter the most. This problem can be solved by monitoring specific lists of social media messages only from your leads, in order to gain perspective on their challenges and needs from your business.

You can create manual lists of people to monitor in Twitter, allowing you to see only messages that are coming from specific people — like, say, a specific sales rep’s leads. Here at HubSpot, we use the brand new Social Inbox to do this. Social Inbox is integrated into the same contacts database a marketer uses to send emails, so we’re able to monitor specific lists, like a sales rep’s specific leads from a CRM like Salesforce. From there, sales reps can monitor everything their leads are tweeting, or filter it further to only deliver streams of messages containing mentions of your company, relevant keywords in your industry, or just about any other custom search term that you care about.

Gather Social Context

Social media can be a great place to gather valuable lead intelligence that fuels your more high-touch sales efforts, like phone calls or in-person meetings. For example, one IT consulting company, NSK Inc., uses social media to streamline their in-person networking events. They host various in-person events in the industry, and invite people to register for free to attend and learn about new technologies in cloud computing and other relevant topics. Before the event, sales reps are able to pull a list of their leads who are attending, and easily view a history of their interactions with the company, a picture of them sourced from Twitter, and a stream of only their tweets. When sales reps have this valuable information ahead of time, they can streamline their conversations to the aspects of their offerings that each person cares about, instead of showing off every feature or capability.

Engage in a Conversation

Though some behaviors have changed with the adoption of new technologies, one thing hasn’t changed: we all still like to be treated like humans. The philosophy of inbound aims to take Marketing and Sales back to square one, and put the person (in this case, a prospect or lead) back at the center of your strategy. That means engaging in helpful conversations, not in sales pitches. That means addressing the specific needs of each individual person, not blasting the same all-encompassing tweet or response. Here are a few tips for better, more personalized social engagement:

1) Answer the Prospect, Not the Competition

If a prospect sends a message out to the Twittersphere asking for experiences with your company versus your competitor, you should, obviously, do what you can to answer their question. You should not send them a message about how much your competition sucks (even if they do). Instead, you could send them a link to a case study or testimonial from an existing customer. If your email marketing client and web analytics are integrated into your social media monitoring tool, you could look into your contact’s past history with your company to better identify what their biggest challenges and interests are, and target your message toward them accordingly.

2) Develop a Personal Relationship

The real secret to social media is simple: be a person. People don’t want to do business with automated social media bots. Social media is an amazing opportunity to break down the faceless front of a company or brand and establish yourself as an actual person at the other end of the screen. This is the kind of rapport sales folks aim to achieve at the beginning of every phone call. Similarly, rapport can be established over social media, all the while having rich lead intelligence on hand to better understand and effectively address your potential customers’ pain points.

3) Don’t Be Afraid of What You Don’t Know

Maybe your leads are asking you questions you don’t have the answers to, whether they be technical or in the domain of another department. The best part about social media is that simply by answering your prospects’ calls, you’re already establishing great brand equity. If someone gives you a tough question, it’s better to tell a prospect that you’ll find them an answer and dig into it deeper with the people in your company that have the answers. Often, people can shy away from this level of uncertainty, but the openness of social media has invited a sense of transparency that, while uncomfortable at first, is preferred (and often demanded) by consumers.

Pretty low-hanging fruit, right? Feel like these are some changes you or someone you love in Sales could make today? (Hint: you totally can!) I believe in you, Sales. Become part of the 78%!

Are you in Sales, or a marketer that works closely with his or her sales organization? How do you leverage the power of social to close more deals? Share your creative tips with us!

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