Situational Marketing

Up Next, Sweet Home Alabama, By Steve L.

All too often, we fail to look at our products through the eyes of the consumer.  E-mail, Voice Broadcast, and IVR are tools for communication.  Our job is to send a message and deliver it quickly, cheaply, and without flaw.

So what happens when we pull off the blinders and start having fun with our technology.  The best (and the worst) emerges.  In this case, both.

Aaron Wellman writes about an IceBreaker promotion that decides to let its hair down, toss back that Margarita, and grab a mike.  IceBreaker used their IVR (Interaction voice recording) to allow consumers to create karaoke ringtones.

after checking online to see if you’re a winner, [it] calls your mobile phone and connects you to an IVR that lets you record a Karaoke that can be used as a ringtone.

It's a great use of the technology, and also a smart way to engage an audience. And it's fun to watch, especially if you like train wrecks (I've been to a lot of karaoke sessions - stick to your ranges, folks).

The original article came from a story by Kelly Hill in RCR Wireless News

Setting Standards for Political Email Lists

The rise of the Internet has led to many a late night and upset stomach for managers of political campaigns. Falling under the category of "Yet Another Thing You Have To Do", the internet has rapidly gone from quirky messaging piece to fundamental piece of your communications puzzle.

The use of e-mail, phone broadcast, and internet messaging is very simple.

Step 1: Get names, addresses, and phone numbers.
Step 2: Contact the voter and tell them to vote for your candidate.
Step 3: Repeat
Step 4:  Win Landslide election, get hired two years from now.

Unfortunately, the modern campaign suffers from the same problems as businesses that market products via the internet. Anything that is easy to do, attracts spammers.

The ease of messaging has led to the abuse of messaging, and voters quickly got fed up with inefficient contacting methods.  There's a cost in sending too many direct mail pieces to the same address.  Postage and material costs force direct mailers to be efficient.  E-mail changes so much, and is so easy to use, that many campaigns attempt a shotgun approach, creating a virtual mailing list and never bothering to make sure it was accurate.

Well, consumers are fighting back, and it has led some people to ask for email standards in campaigns.  Enter the Campaign Monitor Blog.  Mark Wyner is creating a new site that will discuss email standards and the need to use them in campaigns.  Now, Mark is talking about marketing businesses, but it's applicable to the political world as well.

There is a cost to bad email messaging in politics, but it's initially borne by the candidate and the voter, not the e-mail messaging partner.  Ultimately, that lack of standards hurts entire industry, so a lot of kudos to Mark for stepping up.

We're doing our part, but like good capitalists, we developed a software to do so.  We'll be talking more about VoterDecoder in the coming months, but the short version is we allow the voter to choose how they want to be contacted.  Self-Help E-mail List Maintenance.  Keep watching this space for more.

Getting Customers To Listen

If you talk to a winning basketball coach, they'll often tell you the basis of a championship is the fundamentals.  The key to winning teams is taking these phenomenally talented players and forcing them to practice the basics of basketball.

"Hey, kid.  Can you make a free-throw?"

"Sure, Coach."

"Good.  Make four hundred in a row.  Start now."

All too often, good talent, or good ideas, or sometimes even marginal ideas and talent are left alone to perform with the assumption that talent or smarts or willpower is all you need to succeed.  In marketing, as on the basketball court, that attitude leads to inflated expectations and devastating failures.

Over at Interactive Marketing Trends, Giles Rhys Jones covers the basics of any e-mail marketing campaign, and for good measure, I'd like each of your to write them out four hundred times.

Situational Marketing

The title of this blog is Situational Marketing.  It is titled it this way because our company focuses on communications, and increasingly we have come to see that there is no "one right way" to market to a population.

Some people watch television, and others listen to the radio.  Some read the newspaper regularly, and others get their information from blogs.  Some people love coupons in the mail, and some love the idea of coupons showing up on their cell phones.

And for one person that loves one of those channels, at least two people hate it.  Try sending text coupons to a retired couple who only bought phones  in case a tire goes flat on the highway.  Try interesting a teenager in newspaper ads for the clothing they're spending their allowance on.

And try marketing your website to bloggers through the local news affiliate.

So Situational Marketing is here to talk about situational marketing.  Our company is developing products that allow consumers to choose how they are contacted, and we believe that the self-selection model is one of the best ways to make sure you're serving customer's needs without breaking your marketing budget.