January 6, 2008

2008 eROI Online Marketing Prediction #1: Support Local

Businesses Must Support Their Local Community or they will suffer (PR backlash, customer and vendor pressure). Local is the new Organic, but for businesses, not just consumers. There is such truth to the expression - the more you give, the more you get. It applies to giving of your time and money to charity causes and even non-profit professional associations. On the surface, it appears to be a major expense and unproductive distraction to give a significant amount of executive time, employee resources, and company money to local charities like Friends of the Children, Start Making a Reader Today, Zenger Farm, or the Boys and Girls Club. The same logic applies to professional organizations like Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, Starve Ups, Portland Advertising Federation, Software Association of Oregon, American Marketing Association, and a handful of others. Examples of companies who focus on giving back to their communities (click on each company name to go directly to their community involvement webpage) include Kettle Foods, Jive Software, and eROI.

However, it is flawed logic to look at giving back to the community as an expense. Here's why:

• Gain awareness to large groups of prospective clients. Customer acquisition costs are much lower when a business and its customer have a shared connection and shared values.


• Community involvement creates a halo effect of positive association to an altruistic organization with shared values.


• Employee involvement in non-profit organizations deepens the emotional connection and loyalty between the employee and the company.


• Employee recruiting is a whole lot easier with greater local awareness and the positive association with your business doing the right thing (especially in the younger generation of recent college grads).


• Serving on non-profit committees and Board of Directors gives you access to some of the smartest local business execs that can give valuable entrepreneurial business advice you can't get anywhere else.


• Public relations and marketing is a lot easier locally when people are genuinely routing for you.


• Finally, doing the right thing for your community is the whole point of being in business in the first place.

If you don't run a company built on a socially-conscious business model, the least you can do is get involved in your community and I guarantee you will have a huge return on investment for that effort.

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 7:19 AM | Permalink

2008 eROI Online Marketing Prediction #2: Collaboration Software

Social networking sites will turn into collaborative software platforms (think online Calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, web conference, presentation collaboration, image manipulation between many parties, and the already-standard email, chat, IM, blog, profile pages). Social networking isn't just for kids anymore. Over 60% of new Facebook users are over 30 years old now. These 30, 40, 50, and a few 60somethings are professionals who will leverage these online communities to help with more than just business development.

If Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social community sites add professional collaboration tools like personalized calendars, spreadsheets, whiteboards into the mix, business people and businesses as a whole will standardize their entire internal communication operations (document sharing, chat, IM, blog, email threaded discussions) on these collaboration communities for increased productivity, mobility and trackability. A leader in the new frontier of Web 2.0.0.8 Collaboration Software is Portland's own Jive Software and their blazing hot new product called Clearspace.

Comments (2) | Posted by ryan at 6:14 AM | Permalink

2008 eROI Online Marketing Prediction #3: Mobile

Email Service Providers (ESPs) will specialize in optimizing the content rendering on mobile devices. You've received email newsletters on your Blackberry that have image links and website links that are 4-5 lines long per link. It's a usability nightmare to attempt to read a long newsletter with a complex layout. The Email Experience Council ran a poll in May'07 where they found that 61% online marketers thought email should be optimized for mobile devices, yet less than 5% of ESPs offered it. ESPs will adapt and fill this customer need in '08.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 5:12 AM | Permalink

January 5, 2008

2008 eROI Online Marketing Prediction #4: traditional + interactive

Traditional agencies will acquire online marketing software companies and interactive agencies. No, we (eROI) don't want to be acquired for at least the next decade. Yes, this prediction is very real. Traditional agencies will be around for the long haul. They get the big picture. They get branding. They get traditional advertising mediums (TV, outdoor, print, etc.). They do not get interactive.

Interactive agencies get interactive because the entire culture is focused around it. Account folks talk about what they read in the daily newsletters of EmailInsider, eMarketer, MarketingVox, iMediaConnection, or MarketingSherpa. Interactive designers talk about how well certain designs will work with CSS standards, Flickr feeds, blog engines, and other limitations of the online medium that serve as amazing problems to overcome in elegant ways. Technical programmers figure out how to connect it all to a database and make sure it is strong enough to withstand huge traffic spikes if the online campaign becomes truly viral. Some of the most cutting-edge interactive work is done by smaller interactive shops or recently acquired interactive shops that have become an interactive division of a large traditional agency. In a marketing world of increasing complexity, the best quality is being produced by niche specialists (which even includes old examples of the first large-scale viral website Subservient Chicken made by a small interactive agency, the Barbarian Group).

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 9:01 AM | Permalink