In my last post I mentioned analytics as a good think to do during the crisis. Check where the value is in your webtraffic, content etc. and what is a waste. This way you can make your webpresence more effective with the existing resources.

With ‘effective’ do not only think about sales. If time to conversion is getter longer because people are waiting longer before they buy/invest, or if you website is just not an ecommerce site. It may be wise to track leads.

The thing with leads is that you have always this value issue. How valuable are my leads and if I have valuable leads how did I get them.

When you are using only your webanalytics software the best you can get is a conversion rate for leads. You can check which source of traffic is giving you most leads. But this does not say anything about quality.

To get quality info you can do two things. Either you separate lead paths so that you can measure them separately. Or you add info to the lead.

Adding info to a lead can be done manually by asking people to mention or ask for a particular word/code. This way your sales team receiving the leads will have more info about the traffic source.

But you can also integrate you analytics with you CRM for example using Google analytics.

On Clickz.com I saw this nice discussion on the subject of using Flickr for commercial reasons.

In general social media is used more and more for commercial reasons and not everybody is staying relevant.  But the difference between wrong and right is not always clear.

Even if Yahoo is monetizing Flickr with more relevant advertising options. Free publicity will always exist.

Like in old media free and paid publicity have their own place and advantages. Big difference though is that in old media there are editors who are in charge of the quality of content. In new media it’s us, the audience.

Discovering the Digital Branding marketing mix I like to start with Email marketing.

Do you recognize this:

You have this so called ‘friend’ you never hear anything from. He doesn’t call you on your birthday. He hardly knows your name or the name of your children. He actually only contacts you when he needs a favour.

The first time you didn’t notice but the second time it really bothers you.

It is the same with email marketing. Most newsletters you get just ask and don’t give. All they do is talk about themselves without asking you anything. Be carefull email marketing is not a one way street.

We don’t like it when people only talk about themselves (or about their products). If you do so, you better be sure it is interesting, something we didn’t hear many times before. Yes you can get my click if your headline speaks out. But next time I will not fall for your tricks.

Email marketing is more then a sales or lead generation tool. It is also about retaining and connecting with customers. Getting them to be part of your brand experience.

Two tips:

- When you are again filling your newsletter with your next special offer think also about sending out a certain emotion, brand association.  So next newsletter use story telling.

- You do your best to create content you think your subscribers will like. But why not ask. “It is your list, what do you want to hear”

We did ones a test with a music video at the buttom of every newsletter. It seems irrelevant, but it generated the most clicks and we asked people which music to put in the next newsletter.

Branding with email is more than just  a special offer in a nice branded template. It is also about tone of voice. Read more on this on Clickz.com

And yes you can create a lot of damage if you don’t know what you are doing. One good example from aweber.com is: Trying to sell to somebody who just bought. (see full discussion here)

Politics = emotion

sharing,

sharing,

sharing,

emotions.

Twitter goes mainstream says an article in The Wall Street Journal and I think it is.

Last week I noticed a few new starters and besides that you see more and more companies using and tracking twitter.

I mentioned earlier the respond on my complaints about netvibes on twitter and their active reply. You see this happening more often. Lately I had the same thing with skype while complaining about the quality.

One thing to be careful for as a company on twitter is again that you deliver value. There are a bunch of companies which just publish their rss feeds to twitter. That is not so bad. But the thing is they never respond if you send them a message. So no interaction.

About this going meanstream this seems more the case in the US. Counting Swiss Tweets look at swisstweets.chor follow swisstweet on twitter. The amount of twitter users in Switzerland is not much, but think also about the quality of its visitors.

Just back from my holidays. Wondering that most tourist information is still offline.

With the interactive marketing getting more location based cities, countries, regions etc. should consider the huge possibilities of mobile marketing, google.maps, video etc.

I, as a tourist, would like to get info on my mobile while entering a city. Especially on holidays we are in need of information for example about the weather.

I went to Nice in the South of France, lovely place. I Like this webcam so much. Got a free slogan for them (I am using it already) Have a Nice day!