Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

Email and Social Media Marketers Helping Haiti

What’s this about.

We all know of the unprecedented tragedy in Haiti. Often in situations like this we feel helpless to know what to do or who to trust when making donations. Will it go where it’s needed most? Who can we trust?

My longtime colleague from ExactTarget, Karen Jung, recently returned from a 15 month sabbatical from ET. During her time away, she lived and worked among the Haitians, gaining firsthand knowledge of the difficulties of simple, everyday life. She also developed deep relationships with people who live and work in Haiti full time and it’s these relationships we want to leverage to aid those in need.

Karen is an amazing person who has an unbelievably compassionate heart coupled with a brilliant business mind. There is no one I would trust more to know exactly how to deploy charitable aid to help those who have been orphaned or suffered personal loss as a result of the recent earthquake.

In that light, Karen and I got together the day after this disaster and established Haiti-Aid.org. With the support of ExactTarget, Karen is able to focus energy on working with the contacts she has on the ground in Haiti to assess the situation and keep this community appraised of the unfiltered realities of the situation. With her guidance, we have assembled a list of charities that need your help today! You will not hear about these groups in the news or see any fundraising programs on television; but believe me when these are legitimate groups doing good in Haiti long before the earthquake as well as long after.

Karen Jung is unique in being part of our email & social media family but also having had extensive, personal experience and knowledge in Haiti. I ask each and every one of you to please hit the Donate Now button and give whatever you are comfortable with to the charity that most appeals to you. This is a situation where dimes and quarters matter.

We also ask for the support of the entire social media community to pass this site on and leverage what we all do best….quickly building a network of concerned marketers supporting this incredible cause.

www.haiti-aid.org   
Follow on Twitter: @Haiti_Aid

Sincerely,

Chris Baggott

I'm doing some blogging on the job market

I've been invited to guest blog for CareerBuilder as part of their SEO blogging efforts around the Resume Service.  http://resumeblog.careerbuilder.com/blog/resume-writing-advice-2

I support CB's effort because as someone who sees a lot of resumes, I know how difficult it is to differentiate yourself.   I'm dismayed to say how many perhaps great candidates never make it close to a conversation because they look just like everyone else.   Let's face it, in many ways it's a cruel and faceless process.  

So it's kind of fun to be able to endorse a service I really believe in, and perhaps help some deserving people become aware of an alternative to the resume template in their word processor software.

I'm Testing Zemanta...not sure of the application

Image via Wikipedia

So lets say this is a blog post I'm writing about 2-slice Toasters for Global Toasters...(great source to buy a toaster btw..)

So it seems easy to add a picture based on a keyword search but the library isn't that complete....

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• The Bodum Bistro: Ode To A Beautiful Toaster (thekitchn.com)

progress report on Toaster Blogging experiment

So the toaster blogging thing is off to an amazing start. We are on page one for several of our early targeted terms (best small toaster) and I'm actually learning a lot about toasters. I just bought this one for my office.

So far it's been a really successful exercise.   Check out the blogs to see the kind of content.  We are closely watching our bounce rates and read times as the first stage of engagement.  Toaster Shop Blog. 

As you can see from the design, we haven't focused too much energy on design and conversion yet.   Our organic search traffic is growing so quickly that we are gong to have to get on that in the next week or so.

What's this all have to do with Email Marketing?   The simple fact is that business blogging is a database marketing strategy, just like email.   The only difference is the acquisition vs. retention.   Think about the language (bounce rates, read times, click through rates) sound familiar?  This is all about engagement.   The difference is that the focus is on the front end of the relationship.  How do you get introduced?  How do you build your email database?  

You do what we are doing with the toaster blogs.  We have 250 different blogs targeting specific keywords that people use to buy toasters.   We organize our content so that relevant posts get to the right blog (message) and wait for the searcher to come along.

Gartner Hype Cycles and Corporate Blogging

The other day on my Compendium Blogware blog I talked about the new Gartner Hype Cycle.

Obviously the point I was trying to make was that Corporate Blogging is accelerating rapidly up the "Slope of Enlightenment"   But I'm getting a lot of questions about what these terms actually mean, so I thought I'd quote right from Gartner:

According to Gartner "Each  Hype Cycle drills down into the five key phases of a technology’s life cycle."
         

Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
         

Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
         

Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
         

Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
         

Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

How does this play between WordPress and Compendium Blogware?    Open Source and blogging began with the Technology Trigger and went up the Peak of Inflated Expectations right? 

The past two years blogging for business has waned because it was difficult to find ROI and the tools required technology people to run them.  Add to it the lack of security stemming from the requirement of 'plug-in's' made them inappropriate for achieving meaningful business goals.  

Why is Corporate Blogging now screaming up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’?    Because the benefits have begun to crystallize and become widely understood.   This is about search and conversion.  Engagement means happy customers, not happy “readers”....and Second & Third Generation products appear....  Wordpress is 1st generation.   Compendium Blogware is Third Generation.

I'm working on a post based on yesterdays webinar drawing the comparison between the early days of email marketing and blogging and the evolution of data.

My newest Project: A Toaster Blog

I started a Toaster blog a couple of days ago as an eCommerce experiment.  If I happen to make a buck or two...well all the better.

Global Toaster is really an idea not only designed to sell some toasters, but also to showcase my theories about the horizontal web.   For a long time I've focused an argument that whats wrong with the web is the idea of websites, a legacy from the magazine and catalog past.   Here is your cover (homepage) here is your table of contents (tabs & navigation) and here is where you dig dig dig to get to the stuff you want.

It's a pyramid right.   The opportunity is with moving beyond that to data driven pages.  Go wide, with pages that are designed to be search friendly a target the exact terms people use to search with organic landing pages specifically designed for only those terms.   The Toaster-shop is designed like a compended blog series with 250 individual pages spread horizontally targeting 250 different keyword phrases.   Check it out...and oh yeah...buy a toaster :-)

Doug Karr and his new relationship with Compendium Blogware

Some questions came up about Doug Karr and his new relationship with Compendium Blogware.   I think Doug did an excellent job of addressing them in his post the other day http://marketingtechblog.com/2009/07/18/compendium-blogware-resignation/

Be sure to check it out!

Compendium Blogware slides on Slideshare

I just wanted to share this link to our archive of Compendium Blogware slides. 

Chris Baggott's Guide to Blogging - Blog Action Day 2008 End Poverty

Chris Baggott's Guide to Blogging - Blog Action Day 2008 End Poverty

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Chris Baggott's Guide to Blogging - In tough times, you better be easy to find

Chris Baggott's Guide to Blogging - In tough times, you better be easy to find

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