I make no bones about the fact that I freaking love permission based marketing, which is marketing wanker speak for email newsletters. Dollar for dollar, this is the absolute cheapest form of marketing you can engage in, and even if you’ve never thought of having a newsletter before, chances are that when we work together, you’re having one.

There are two reasons I love newsletters. One, anyone who would turn down the opportunity to put their brand in front of hundreds or thousands of people each week or month and generate click-thus for their site for pennies is a moron. Two, because these subscribers have opted in and asked to hear from you, they already have an affinity for your brand, product or service. These are essentially pre-qualified buyers, and if you can get them to open your mail and give them a strong call to action, you can pretty much convert the snot out out of them.

Plus I love doing them. I make a lovely looking HTML newsletter if I do say so myself, and the metrics you get from Campaign Monitor are like crack bananas for monkeys. Every mailing is pretty much 24 hours of stats porn, and the market intelligence in those stats is worth 1,000x the cost of the mailing. It’s fantastic.

So when I work with a new client, some portion of the time is spent on the mechanics of building their new subscriber list. People new to email marketing generally have a vague notion that you go out and buy a list somewhere, but in fact you never do this. You build your own list, slowly and carefully, with a combination of cunning and brute force.

The standard “sign up to our newsletter” form on most websites (including this one) isn’t, let’s face it, enormously appealing. If you want people to sign up – and I assume you do even though I do not – you need to help them do that:

• Incentivise People: Very few people want more email. However, many people would like the chance to get discounts, to enter a contest, to get industry intelligence, or whatever carrot you can offer.
• Bribe People: “Would you like to give me your email address?” is not really a winning sales pitch. “Would you like to enter to win a free Wii?” works surprisingly well, however.
• Catch People: Catch them at checkout with a tick box when they’re buying from your online store, and catch them at the till with a clipboard list if you have a retail shop. Don’t be aggressive but make sure you give them an opportunity to opt in.

The best example I have of guerilla list building in action is Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie. Ciara does six trade shows a year, mostly bridal fairs. She doesn’t have a product to sell to brides that would make doing shows worth her financial while, which is sort of a bummer. On the plus side, the aisles are literally crawling with women who are perfect for her mailing list.

So that’s what she does. She parks herself next to a display stand with a champagne bucket and a romantic arrangement of bubbly and fluted glasses and says “Would you like to enter to win a free champagne draw?” several hundred times a day. The first time I saw her do this, she signed up 400 subscribers on paper entry forms, and then nagged one of her brothers into entering them into her database. (Ciara does not have siblings; she has staff.)

This is, from a guerilla marketing point of view, a brilliant result though not entirely unexpected – Ciara could sign Eskimos up for ice. What’s interesting from a mailing list point of view, however, is the unsubscribe rate. Our strategy with these gigs has always been to announce the winner of the bridal fair draw in the next newsletter, so that those manually-entered subscribers are very definitely getting the content they signed up for.  Still, you’d expect a lot of people to unsubscribe when they a) don’t win, and b) get a newsletter they had never seen before and didn’t exactly wake up that morning desperate to join.

But they don’t. These subscribers are such tightly targeted, high-value acquisitions that they stay. They unsubscribe at a rate of less than 1%. Complaint and bounce rates are so low as to be statistically insignificant.

And that, my friends, is pure marketing gold.

I’ll be honest with you and say that most people who are start-ups are absolutely horrified when I suggest not only that they go outside and talk to real people, but solicit them as well. You absolutely can do this kind of marketing online from the safety of your PJs using social networks, but you cannot target it on Twitter the same way you can at a trade show, gig, or conference. You can do a pretty good interest-targeting job with Facebook ads, but your click-thrus will be shit.

I am nothing if not the queen of Do As I Say, Not as I Do, so as a concrete example here’s how I would build my list if I was interested in increasing the subscriber base for the newsletter I have no idea what to do with:

• I would have launched my re-design with a contest for a free Bootcamp session and a Wii, tied together with a marketing strapline like “Get Business Fit” except less lame.
• I’d Tweet my contest once and rely on people with whom I have credibility and karma to re-tweet it for me, then pray it trickled down. I’d also run a Facebook campaign for cheap kicks and reinforcement.
• I would embark on a round of Barcamp talks, Open Coffee rounds and maybe a local tech conference or two. At the end of each talk I did, I’d send round a clipboard for signups and pimp the online contest.
• I’d Tweet and blog about it one more time before the contest entry closing date, and then call and yell at myself for being tacky and embarassing.

I’m pretty sure that with a bit of effort there, I could gain several hundred subscribers for the price of a Wii. Luckily, I don’t have €169 at the moment, so you will be spared from a campaign designed to get you to sign up for my newsletter, and I will be spared from having to actually decide what to put in it and sending it.

And really, isn’t it better when we all win this way?

Photo: ©Rob DiCaterino

Here’s a really common scenario:

You get a new client and they have a great product but no brand. Let’s say they make, I dunno, cow print toys or clothing or something, so you futz around for a while and decide to call the company Cowlabunga. (Just roll with me here.) You get to work and develop strong visuals for print and web and awesome messaging for use everywhere. The client loves everything, and then – after having stared at this shit for 60 hours – they have a crisis of faith.

Normally, these crises are some combination of the following:

1. They get hung up on the pronunciation. Is it cow-la-bunga or cool-a-bunga? Will people get confused? Frankly, it doesn’t matter – you say potato, I say patatoe, but everybody is clear about what vegetable we’re discussing. Is Vimeo pronounced vi-may-oh or vi-me-oh? I have no idea and care even less; I can spell it, find it, and host my videos on it, so whatever – it works.

2. They get literal with the logo. People who are new at starting or leading companies are universally obsessed by their own logo. And the telecom guy always wants a phone, the real estate guy always wants a house and everyone in anything to do with discounts always wants to dick around with currency symbols.

Even in 1971, Nike’s designer knew you don’t do that. Your logo does not need to be literal to be clear. Nobody thinks McDonald’s sells arches, and nobody thinks Nike sells swooshes.

A logo need not – and often arguably should not – be representative of the specific product the company sells or the specific service it delivers. That is not the job of a logo. Thinking that the logo is what defines a brand or is even the most important part of the brand experience means that someone has no understanding of what branding is and probably should not be trusted to market a company.

3. They get hung up on the logo. Once the logo is agreed, clients tend to think it’s cast in stone. It shouldn’t be, because you absolutely can play with it. Google does. The BBC does. The New Museum of Contemporary Art does, too, rendering the words NEW and MUSEUM in a consistent type face and sticking whatever they want between them.

The static logo is dead, and thank God for that because if I have to fuck up one more website, flyer or poster because some sponsor’s logo MUST have a 30mm white surround, I’m going to start taking hostages. Your logo is a tool, not a monolith; it’s there to be used, not preserved as a sacred cow.

I would suggest, however, that you not call your company Cowlabunga. It sounds like a foot disease.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

I sincerely think that is everything you need to know about social media in four tweets.

Alternatively, you could just watch @shutterstock shill on Twitter for an object lesson in what not to do.

(I did try to illuminate the path for them, just because it pains me so to watch these companies vomit all over their expensive branded shoes. Not surprisingly, the PR muffin or graduate intern or highly paid Social Media Expert™ or whoever they have working that account totally did not get it.)

And so it proved to be with NetExpo’s  Search Event 2009. I could try to explain to you the complete and utter trainwreck this turkey turned out to be when it opened today, but I genuinely don’t think I could do it justice and a picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. Click for larger images:

That’s the “Main Hall” – you have to click the tiny text for Hall A or Hall B to visit the exhibition halls:

This is Hall B. You can’t actually click any of those exhibition booths – which is just as well because how much would you not want to be the tiny ones at the back? – you have to click the imperceptible “Show Booths” link at the top:

And that brings us to the “exhibitors.” This is the Blacknight, erm, booth. I don’t think Blacknight is particularly being punished for something; they all more or less look like that.

There are a million crap ideas crappily executed every day, so I’m not sure why I find this one so completely irksome. I think it has something to do with the fact that they’ve illegitimately promoted it as some kind of ground-breaking first for Ireland,when it is in fact the opposite of ground-breaking and what’s more, completely embarassing.

In all seriousness, it’s like these people just discovered the internet the day before yesterday and have stepped straight into a time machine headed for 1997. They’re saying things like “deliver your sales message to customers new and old right into where they work during their regular business hours!” and I think they actually mean it. They have a blog entry titled “Why you should do business online” and I think they mean that, too.

The thing is, this is not the worst idea ever. There is arguably a market for and a value to bringing companies together in a virtual space for time-limited promotional event with a lot of buzz around it. But the execution here is just so, so appalling that I actually called a few exhibitors to find out if they knew it was going to be like this – because I couldn’t believe anyone had signed up for this pile of horsehit.

Predictably, the most common response was “Oh my God. Oh my GOD. OH MY GOD!” followed by the sound of foreheads crashing into keyboards. So I’m guessing no.

Hilariously, under each booth is scrolling text that says If You Would Like To Find Out More About Hosting Your Own Online Expo….Contact Us At…

That would be 1997@compuserve.com, yes?

I’m delighted to announce a new, two-part training day for small and medium businesses on 12 June in Cork called Putting the Internet to Work. It may sound hokey but this full-day, hands-on seminar is specifically designed to help businesses build online strategies, market effectively, and move forward in what we’ll politely call a new economic climate.

You can download complete details here, but in a nutshell, Martina Skelly and I will be conducting a crash course in digital marketing, covering blogging, social media, and the full Google toolbox from SEO to PPC Adwords campaigns:

Building Business Through Social Media

The Social Media seminar runs from 10 AM to 1 PM and covers:

• The Whys and How-Tos of blogging for small and medium businesses;
• Understanding and leveraging social networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook;
• Tools and metrics for quantifying results from blog and social network campaigns.

Putting Google to Work for Your Business

The Google Tools seminar runs from 2 PM to 5 PM and covers:

• Safe and effective SEO strategies to improve natural search engine results and rankings in Google;
• Using Google AdWords to run cost-effective PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns;
• Utilizing Google Analytics to pull it all together, monitor results, and calculate ROI.

We’ve tried to keep costs low while also keeping seminar sizes small: registration is limited to just eight people in each session. You can register for the full day for €150 or choose either half-day session for €80.

We’d like to make this day available to everyone who’d like to attend, so if you need a bursary, just let me know and we’ll do our very best to get you there.

WHO: People marketing small and medium businesses
WHAT: SEO, PPC, blogging and social media [full details]
WHERE: Lancaster Lodge, Western Road, Cork
WHEN: Friday, 12 June 2009, 10 AM – 5 PM
HOW: Registration is now open!

This afternoon, I received an email off my contact form from the unfortunately named Elias Shams at the unfortunately named Searchles. According to the email footer, “Searchles” rhymes with “circles.” I can’t help thinking, though, that there’s a fundamental problem with you brand when you have to point out to people that it does not rhyme with words like artless, tactless and clueless.

Anyway, the email just smelled spammy; it was not addressed to me personally, and not about anything I’ve ever expressed any interest in. So I double-checked with Twitter and indeed: Suzy got it once, Damien twice, Darragh twice, Lexia twice, and Redmum also twice.

I believe, campers, that we call this Yahtzee!

Just to be clear, I don’t mind at all when people use my contact form to contact me. I do mind, however, when people use it as a dumbwaiter for delivering piping hot spam direct to a random Inbox. And I particularly mind it when the communication attempt is as wildly inept as Elias’ was:

• If you want to contact me, have the courtesy to actually figure out my name and address me. (BIG HINT: My name is IN MY URL.) It helps to foster the illusion that this is at least a little bit about me and not all about you.
• The email has six links to six different sites within it. You have my attention for less than thirty seconds; give me ONE PLACE to go.
• It has no specific call to action. Again, you have my attention for less than thirty seconds; give me ONE THING to do.

A good pitch email just isn’t that hard to put together. And when you’re sending it to hundreds or thousands of bloggers, each one vocal and each one carting around their own personal soapbox, it’s particularly important that you get it right.

As I pointed out to Elias when I wrote back to him, if you spend half as much time copywriting your email as you do trawling for random bloggers to send it to, you’re much more likely to end up with a pitch that doesn’t suck out loud.

Elias replied to tell me that this wasn’t spam, that he picked me to write to because of the Ladies Tea party post; apparently, he loves women and thinks we’re the best thing ever. (I’m sure Damien and Darragh will be totally flattered to hear that.) And apparently, my little missive has broken him as a man:

I can’t believe you think my pitch suck :-( u just put a huge crack on my heart :-(

And so, courtesy of Suzy, I leave this as consolation for poor Elias:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am delighted to announce that plans have been formalised and the 2nd Annual Ladies Tea Party and Knitting Circle will be held at the Cork Airport Hotel. We will be swanning about one of their spiffy private apartments prior to the Blog Awards, which will hopefully be a nice setting and mean more mixing than last year.

The ticket price of €17 per person covers everything – venue, food, alcohol, and soft drinks – thanks to help from these lovely people:

Sponsor: Curious Wines
Booze for this event is lovingly sponsored by online wine retailer Curious Wines, who apparently heartily approves of ladies tippling (or toppling) into their teacups.

Sponsor: Campaign Monitor
The fine email marketing software folks at Campaign monitor have very kindly sponsored food for this event, and made managing the registrations pure bliss.

Donor: iFoods.tv
Brownies for this event are being hand made by Niall Harbison of IFoods.tv, so you'll get to say a handsome famous chef has personally baked for you.

Donor: Piosa Cake
Jo from Pisoa Cake is - oh joy! - bringing beautiful, yummy, fluffy cupcakes. Please confine your drool to your own cupcakes only.

Obviously, the title of this event is complete and utter farce. Having said that, Marian has suggested that anyone interested in knitting or crochet bring some work and we can have a bit of a stitch ‘n bitch whilst we’re there.

Registration is limited to 30 people. You need to complete a registration form for each person attending, and it’s first come, first served.

Who: You. A pre-event mixer for Ireland’s women bloggers.
When: Saturday, 21 February from 4 – 7 PM
Where: Cork Airport Hotel, Apartment 201 (NOT room 201)
What: Food, drink, occasional knitting, general merriment
How much: €17 per person.
Registration: NOW OPEN. CLOSED. Full.

Online advertising in Ireland is, frankly, an expensive pain in the arse. There are very few venues where advertisers can directly place ads, and when you’re trying to match the venue to your client’s product so the ad is well-niched, the pool shrinks considerably.

On top of that, advertising driven websites here are selling ad space in their ridiculously laden sidebars at a CPM rate of €10 and up – that’s €10 or more for every 1,000 times your ad is shown. Some of these sites have a click-through rate of .06%, which means that for every person who finally clicks your ad, you’ve paid a whopping €16.66. My response to that is “fuck right off. ”

For this reason, I like Facebook. Facebook is universally reviled for having the worst click-thru rate in the industry at an average of .04%, but here’s the thing: I don’t care. I’m not being charged per impression; I’m being charged per click. I don’t care that an ad was viewed 50,000 times before it got a single click – I care that I got a total of 606 clicks at an average cost of 24 cents each.

Compare 24 cents to €16.66, and you’ll start liking Facebook, too.

For its sins, Facebook allows a very nice level of targeting – country, age, gender, relationship status, orientation, and as a bonus, you can further refine by keywords in people’s interests profiles. That’s a real strength.

It also has a lot of drawbacks, so it can work well for some kinds of campaigns and not so well for others:

• It’s bouncy. The bounce rate off Facebook click thrus is very high. For a client with a bounce rate normally in the 30s, we saw bounce rates in the mid-60s from Facebook.
• It doesn’t convert. Trying to sell product off Facebook ads has resulted in a uniformly abysmal goal conversion rate and the ROI is crap. Non-financial goals do better.
• The billing is shit. Seriously shit. There’s no company name on the irritating daily email receipts, and no sniff of a VAT receipt either.

Having said all of that, I still like Facebook for some purposes. It’s great for:

• Pure traffic. If all you need to do is raise your visitor numbers, Facebook will deliver. They serve a massive number of pages, so even at a 0.04% click thru rate, you’ll see as much traffic as you’re willing to pay for.
• Brand Awareness. You only get charged when someone clicks, so as far as I’m concerned, the last batch of ads I ran got my client’s brand in front of people 742,000 times for free.
• Targeted Ads: If you desperately want to target gay people, married women, or men between 25 and 35 with a stated interest in Battlestar Galactica, Facebook can be very precise within the available parameters.

And frankly, even if Facebook was entirely shite, I’m still not paying €16.66 per click. As one client pointed out, “I’d be better off standing on a street corner and offering passers by a tenner to step into my shop.”

I am saved from the pressure of having to come up with a blog post today by the fact that I’ve very cleverly already written one – a guest post over at Joe Scanlon’s place called Five Things You Should Know About Online Marketing for Broke Start-Ups.

Technically, it went up five days ago. I didn’t notice because I spent all of last week distracted by a jaw-droppingly overwhelming work load and being convinced I was going to die of cancer. (I’m not, as it turns out, so that’s a bonus.)

Anyway, when Joe approached me to do a Five Things, he suggested something about design and I said I’d get back to him with something else. I love design – I love seeing it, I love reading about it, I love hearing about it and I love doing it, but I am completely inarticulate when it comes to writing or talking about it.

I can talk about internet marketing all day, though.  I’ve been doing a lot of it lately, and having a great time – mostly thanks to my personal AdWords guru, Dave at Redfly, who in addition to being outrageously good looking, has been very generous with his time in sorting out my dyslexic thrashings through the terribly confusing AdWords user interface.

I totally love him, and the AdWords dashboard is officially my new crack pipe.

One of the most predictable questions clients ask just before their new site goes live is “How do I get press coverage for my site launch?” My uniform but depressing answer is “Why would you get press coverage for your site launch?”

The harsh reality is that few news outlets are going to cover the launch of a site, because guess what – it isn’t news. New web sites launch daily in their thousands, and no matter how special you think your unique snowflake may be, it just isn’t that special.

Therefore, if you want media coverage, you need to actually make news. Here is how we did that for Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie, where you can search for available reception venues based on your chosen wedding date and location. The hook in Step 2 will be different for every site, but the basic methodology is the same for all the clients I’ve been through this with.

1. Relate your product or service to something current in the news.

We’re diving head first into a recession, and the media has an endless appetite for recession stories. Weddings cost an average of 20K, so there’s probably a news story nicely nestled between big ticket items and topical budget cutting that we can tease out.

2. Find or create a hook that legitimately ties in your business.

To create our news story, we designed the 2008 Wedding Budget Survey using a free PollDaddy survey, and asked brides and grooms if the recession was impacting their wedding budgets. Ciara got a lovely prize sponsored by one of her hotels to lure 100 people in for the survey, and then we crunched all the data to get some nice beefy stats.

3. Write a really good press release.

There are two tricks here. The first is: do not write a press release. Instead, write the story you want the papers to run. (See press release here.) Format it like a press release and call it a press release, but make it easy for busy journalists to see the whole story by writing it yourself – preferably really well.

The second trick is to make the press release about your news story but work your client into it so seamlessly that it is almost impossible to cover one without the other. When done well, you’ll have about a 90% success rate with this.

4. Distribute it to a hand-picked media list.

Ciara’s homework assignment while I was doing 1, 2 and 3 was to buy all the papers and magazines for a full two weeks and start pulling names and contact details for people and editors covering this kind of story. Regional contact details came from the book. We targeted lifestyle, business and women’s sections of national and local newspapers and magazines.

5. Be available to respond to media calls and emails.

Ciara got loads of calls and contacts after sending out her release. Some outlets just ran the press release; others were more interested and called for interviews and sent photographers. Some ran the survey story and some ran more general pieces about her. It doesn’t matter; they would never have run any of these stories if she’d simply sent out a standard new website release.

So the press release did its job and generated several news stories:

• The Sun
• The Echo (full page in Women on Wednesday)
• The Cork Independent
• The Kingdom
• The Kerryman
• The Corkman

Bridal mags print quarterly, so we’re still waiting to see what, if anything, pops up there, but that’s a nice result with a good regional spread.

One thing I would encourage anyone to do before embarking on a campaign like this, however, is to really consider the benefit of traditional press. Because honestly, for a lot of businesses, there is no benefit. Read that again: there is no benefit.

Newspaper mentions and even radio and television coverage will not result in the traffic bump on your site that you expect. Let’s face it -  The Sunday Business Post is not The Colbert Report, so if you’re hoping for a Colbert Bump from a mention in the Irish media, you’re likely to be sadly disappointed. Online links are likely to bring you far more traffic, so for most small businesses, time is better invested generating online coverage than offline coverage.

However, there are at least two instances where it is worth pursuing traditional media:

• Investors – If you have a pool of investors or a board of directors, these people just love being handed a big fat press clippings file. It’s a tangible result they understand.
• Stakeholders – In Ciara’s case, the hotels listing on her site are her stakeholders, and all this press lends huge credibility when she goes out to sell to them. As Mulley points out, this kind of traditional PR is about reputation.

I am not a professional PR person and I don’t have the contacts that might have resulted in more national coverage for this story. However, I’ve also seen some of the big PR agency price tags, and I’m pretty confident that with our little DIY press campagn, we got 80% of the bang for about 10% of the buck. If you’re a bigger company or situated more offline than online, it’s probably worth it to bring professional PR on board. But if you’re bootstrapping your online business, it’s worth knowing that like Irish brides, you can DIY it for less.