Time to start spending intelligently

How often do we hear about $50 million in paid search, millions in TV or tons of money in some other acquisition tactic?

Not enough attention (or funding) is paid to website optimization. You can spend all the money in the world to find and get people to your website, but if you aren't spending against optimizing and improving your site's performance, you're throwing your $ away.

Great tools like Omniture's Test and Target, Google Site Optimizer exist just to help your site convert better. All offer A/B and multi-variate testing capability that will really help you drive the most benefit from those millions you're spending in acquisition.

So, are you spending the way you should be?

Getting in touch with my individual crowd

So my new favorite site is CrowdTap. Currently in beta, they just secured a $7 million round of financing from VCs. Te platform is a crowd sourcing community platform, or a crowdunity platform. It allows for self serve for community development, content sharing, WOM generation, polling and quick hit research. Pretty cool for a self-service platform.

When Social Media Goes Right

So, once I ended my tenure at Starwood, I decided that for me to be successful, I needed to practice "personal distribution". What does that mean? "Burt", the brand, is about creativity, ideas, relationships. Since I believe that Social Media is a tactic, not a strategy, it was one of the tactics I employed for self promotion. My FaceBook account, LinkedIn account, blogs, twitter, youtube, flickr, etc all became ways for me to promote myself.

What has it gotten me? For one, a job at Knowledge Universe. On top of that, I have been a published photographer (http://amzn.to/cZ2MUE) in two books, and was most recently asked to speak to a group of 200 about Mountain Climbing. Its actually pretty incredible when you think about it. I have spent some time marketing myself, and not in push marketing. But, as people look for information, they are finding me!

The web offers a ton of free distribution. As we all know, anyone, or any brand, would be crazy not to take complete advantage.

Megatron, what I love about Social Media

My new favorite use for social media is the Facebook page, bit.ly/90I8jZ. The fan page was set up by a guy who obviously bet his sister that if he got 1 million fans, she'd have to name her unborn child Megatron. Well, it spread like fire. He is at 1.3 million as of today, 3/13. Whats amazing was the speed with which the page ramped up. I looked on Tuesday and it was in the 800k range. Every time I refreshed, it grew at least by 5k, usually more. Finally, by Friday, his sister was toast. Read the comments, highly entertaining. People demanding birth certificates, asking if the middle name will be skeletor, and having a good time.

Nice to know the tools exist to help give children ridiculous names!

Happy New Year! And not to beat a dead cable company, but...

First of all, happy new year. I know I haven't written anything in a while, but, I am all fired up now. I am PASSIONATE about the customer. I know it sounds trite, but its true.

So, this morning I get a call from Comcast asking about my recent installation (yes I am aware its from a 3rd party research company, and, we are forced to use Comcast as they are basically a monopoly in Portland). They went through a bunch of standard customer sat. questions. "Did you get a welcome kit?" "no". "Did the installer explain how to set up voicemail?" "no". I asked if they would correct anything based on this call and send me a welcome kit, etc. The response? "I don't know. Hopefully the company will look at it". SO WHY DID I WASTE MY TIME ON A SATURDAY MORNING TALKING TO THEM????????

So frustrating. New marketing 101 rule. If you ask your customer's a question make sure you respond to their answers! DON'T waste people's time! Get your research company to identify issues at a customer level and react. You would be amazed at the loyalty you can drive.

New Job

Hi,

Interested in moving to Portland and helping to run the web program for the #1 company in the early childhood education and child care space? Check out the job description. http://bit.ly/5Hkk9g

Great Deck on Netflix's Culture

Just saw this presentation and love it for its honesty, simplicity, directness and a lot of the thoughts in it. The questions is poses for judging yourself and your teams really makes you think about the standards you set.

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

As You Can See...

From the post below you can now see that I am well ensconced in my new role as VP Digital and Customer Experience Marketing at Knowledge Learning Corporation, parent company of KinderCare, Knowledge Beginnings, CCLC and Champions, all early childhood education companies.

I am loving it. The people are great. Mature leaders who all want to do whats best for the company, but even more importantly, as one leader said "whats right for the kids". I really enjoy working in a place that can make a difference.

The work is great. Helping to develop a digital strategy is a great exercise and something I am really enjoying.

The Announcement of My New Role

A message from Anne Saunders, Chief Marketing Officer

I am pleased to announce that Burt Rosen has joined Knowledge Learning Corporation as Vice President, Digital and Customer Experience, reporting to me.

In this position, Burt will lead the team responsible for value-add customer experiences online; areas of focus will include developing a search COE (center of excellence) for the enterprise, building a state of the art digital community for KLC parents and students, assist businesses in optimizing their lead generation, and establishment of a “web community” of existing site owners to drive consistency, best practice, etc. Burt will collaborate closely with other Shared Services and all lines of business to ensure alignment and integration of strategies, projects and programs for successful implementation and results.

Burt comes to KLC with more than 20 years experience in interactive and traditional marketing. Most recently he was the Vice President, Starwood Preferred Guest and Brand Interactive Marketing for Starwood Hotels and Resorts, one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with 960 properties in 97 countries and approximately 145,000 employees. In this position, Burt oversaw the team responsible for leading interactive marketing, integrated marketing, web site development and a call center strategy for the company’s nine hotel brands and its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) loyalty program. He was responsible for using all marketing channels including hotel, online, call center, email, offline, PR and social networking to launch member engagement efforts including the “SPG You Choose” program and leading numerous innovation projects including blogs, Web 2.0 and other strategic initiatives.

Burt also built an internal digital agency at Starwood, creating and leading a client
services team that acted as the single point of contact between the web and call center
teams, the brands and other stakeholders. He also managed and directed numerous outside agencies including online media, interactive marketing, research, and offline and loyalty/direct marketing agencies. Prior to joining Starwood, Burt spent six years in account management at interactive agencies, Modem and Avenue A Razorfish, leading efforts including website development and interactive marketing for clients including Starwood, GE, Delta, Marriott, Philips, JC Penney, Kodak and others.

I’m very excited to have a leader with Burt’s depth and breadth-of-experience join our company. His extensive experience in leveraging interactive and social media on behalf of brands, web strategy and development and online media acquisition will change the way we reach potential customers and retain current customers. Burt’s leadership combined with his creativity and passion for a holistic marketing approach will positively impact our families and support our business goals.

Burt holds a bachelor’s degree in European History from the University of Chicago . He and his family will be relocating to Portland from Connecticut within the next few months. As you might expect, in addition to his professional social media experience, Burt authors two blogs, Tweets, and can be found on FaceBook, LinkedIn, 12seconds and TripIt.

Burt has expressed his excitement to be joining the company and to “hit the ground running.” He is looking forward to meeting with many of you soon to learn more about the lines of business, departments and initiatives at KLC. When you have the opportunity to meet him, please take the time to welcome him to our team.

Been a Little Lazy

Its been a while since I posted. That doesn't mean that I don't love marketing anymore. What it means is that I was in Ecuador for 9 days climbing mountains, and the day before I left, I GOT A JOB!!!!

I am thrilled about everything now. I accepted a role as VP Digital for a company called Knowledge Learning Corporation, the biggest player in early childhood education (they own KinderCare). The company has great people, great financial backing, and a ton of opportunity to own the space.

KLC is based in Portland OR, which gets us back to the west coast to a city that fits us very well. We are working on moving now. I start working next tuesday (7/7) and will be back and forth for a few weeks until we move the family.

Reasons for Being Delinquent on Postings

So, there really isn't a great reason why I haven't posted in a few weeks but I will try. I am in the midst of a few job interviews and have been traveling. I am very excited about the opportunities I am pursuing and hopefully the one I am most interested in will come to fruition soon.

Add to that my trip to Ecuador. I am leaving on June 20 to go climbing in Ecuador with the biggest mountain being Cotopaxi, at 19,347 feet. So between the interviewing, the traveling for interviewing, and getting into shape and getting ready for Ecuador I have been a little strapped on time.

I did however, at 12:01 am this morning, register www.facebook.com/burtrosen for my profile URL. Hopefully everyone registered their names. If not, go to www.facebook.com/usernames and do it now.

Welcome To Anyone Coming from My FaceBook Ad Campaign

Today I placed my first ad ever on behalf of myself on FaceBook. Its pretty cool. I targeted by age, by geography, by company, and had a host of other target filters available. I bid .25 on a CPC figuring low risk, and why not take any volume I can get? I am driving everyone here.

Its a 10 day campaign so I will let you know the results over the next 10 days! Want to try it yourself? Go to FaceBook and click on the advertising link on the bottom.

Lets see how the campaign works and thanks for visiting my blog!

www.tiny.url.bit.ly.wherethehellismybrand?

Its been a little while since I have posted, which tends to mean the job search is going well. More on that in a minute.

But, for now, today's rant. URL shorteners. What the hell? I understand the value of a huge string of characters (which means something only to a server) being shortened to a very concise URL. But, when the URLs get shortened, so does the brand name. So for example, instead of someone sending me an article at www.wired.com/xyzalkdfhasdlkfjasdlfk, I am now getting bit.ly/?fo. I get the convenience factor, but if I am Wired Magazine, I would rather have the former URL so that people know that I am responsible for the content. That way, I can use my URLs to build my brand.

It would be interesting if a brand decided to take action and mandate their URLs contain their brand names. I wonder if that could happen? Like a Google trademark letter but for URL shortners? Stay tuned.

When SocialMedia meets Word of Mouth

View more presentations from Mark Silva.

Everything Communicates

As I have mentioned before, being laid off gives me great opportunity to talk to a lot of people and also to crystallize my own thoughts on a variety of topics.

I have been thinking a lot about social media; what it is exactly, how it fits in, how people use it, etc. What's apparent to me, is that social media is not an end, but a means. Its also very apparent that social media is not some online phenomenon, but online has developed the set of tools that make conversations easier and louder. One could argue that a conversation in class, at a bar, at work is a form of social media, but now those conversations can get very wide distribution through online tools.

The other thing that has become more obvious, is that with the advent of the online tools, EVERYTHING becomes marketing. Customer service is now as much of a marketing tool as advertising. A bad customer experience, can lead to a Tweet, FB Status, blog post, YouTube video etc about the experience.

So, EVANGELISM should now be a key objective, and the one that potentially drives social media use. In my opinion, ROI is nice from social media, but the value of it is the ability to "Democratize Your Distribution" and create brand evangelists with loud voices and broadcasting capabilities. The attribution (latency) period might be longer, but in the end, its more valuable.

Great Deck Highlighting Trends for 2009

Iconoculture cracks the code on global macrotrends

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Not NEW YORKER, NETWORKER

Just joined a great organization for Marketing execs, MENG. Its made up of 2000 people who were a VP or above and made a good salary. The organization is great for job hunting, networking (whoever thought I would be a "networker"), knowledge sharing and meeting people with like interests.

Its not cheap to join, but seems to be well worth it.

Twitter and Cable TV - 500 Channels and There's Nothing On (Thanks Bruce)

I have been using and following on Twitter for a while and there are some things I love to follow and am impressed with:

• CEO of Zappos
• Onward Search
• Hang in There Jack

But, as Twitter gains in popularity and usage, my lists of Tweets are becoming unwieldy. Sure, I have TweetDeck that helps to organize the tweets, but still, everytime I look at TweetDeck do I want to invest 30 minutes to catch up? and the more cool people I find to follow, the more unwieldy and unusable it gets. What happens when every brand I love, every friend I have, every company I want to work for are all tweeting? I am a big offender, but do I need to read everytime someone sees a movie or eats something? Isn't it just too much?

It might end up that there is so much, its just easier to ignore all of it. I am not there yet, but I am a little at a loss on what to follow, how to read it, and when to care! I will continue to work on this one. Maybe there is a business that allows for real filtering of tweets with notifications?

Social Media Diagrams

I was going through TweetDeck and checking out today's crop of tweets from friends, pundits, corporations, job people and came across a Tweet from Tech Crunch with a link to the Future Lab blog that offers a number of great diagrams illustrating the social media universe.

Check them out. Its very helpful to be able to see everything laid out in a visual form.

Attack of the Buzzwords

One thing you learn as you search for jobs in the new world is that there is a serious proliferation of BS marketing/social media/interactive terms.

The people who use them seem to be the pundits. The people who interpret them seem to be the ones who are successful either on their own or on behalf of others.

The BS Bingo game board on the left is a classic. Enjoy it!