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It’s hard to tell these days whether April Fool’s Day pranks are approached from the angle of brand building or just as a bit of fun between colleagues. Regardless, this year’s hallowed day still delivered a host of pranks, despite falling on a Sunday. Marketing has looked around for the best pranks of the year and presents to you our top 10, in no particular order.

1. Telstra, Everything 80s is cool again

Telstra brought back the gold phone for April Fool’s Day this year, complete with coin operated, old-school, push-button dialling and easy to read non-high-definition display. Great for the home or office!

2. Google, Roo View

Google announced plans to supplement Street View, via Street Roo, by deploying a ‘roo force’ with cameras strapped to their heads.

“Over the next four weeks, more than a thousand Big Red kangaroos will be equipped with a 360-degree head camera that will automatically capture images when the marsupial is on the move during daylight hours.

“To ensure a seamless experience – and to avoid motion sickness – we have also developed software that will smooth over the bouncing effect experienced with the raw data.

“Images will be wired to Google in real-time. A GPS tracker embedded into the jacket will match the location of the kangaroo to ensure the image is accurately uploaded onto the new Street View layer.”

3. YouTube, DVD collection

Another one from Google, this time for YouTube, which you can now order on DVD. YouTube will send you every video ever uploaded ever; as soon as you sign up they will dispatch a fleet of 175 YouTube trucks to your home. Since approximately an hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second, you’ll receive an extra truckload every week.

4. Kraft, Cherry flavoured Vegemite

The consumer goods company posted this picture on their Facebook page:

5. MINI, Build your own Countryman

“MINI is making it easier than ever for Australians to own their own MINI Countryman. By April 1, interested customers had to fill out this form attached to this print ad. In return, they would get one part of a MINI Countryman every month. 29,782 parts later… you’re all set. Drive on. And it only costs 95 cents (plus postage.)”

6. Sony, Vaio Q – The world’s smallest ultrabook

Sony went to a lot of trouble to put together a video for its April Fool’s prank – an ultrabook the size of a quarter.

7. Mashable, Conan O’brien takes over

Conan tells all in the video below, “Hello, fellow Mashables. It’s Conan O’Brien, and I’ve got big news. Two hours ago, I purchased Mashable.com. I’ve taken it over. Why did I take it over? Very simple reason.

I’m sick and tired of scanning the Internet looking for any news about technology: Devices, gadgets, what’s coming up, maybe even a rating system for gadgets that are out there. It doesn’t exist on the web and it’s high time it did.

I go to the Mashable see the atrocious job they’re doing. So I decided it’s time for me to take it over. That’s why, several hours ago, I called Pete Cashmore and I told him, “You’re out! Get out! You’re through, Cashmore! Through! Get out!”

8. ZDNet, Huwaei buys Sydney Harbour Bridge

ZDNet went with not-very-prolific tech-writer ‘Avril Primer’, who brought us the news that China’s Huawei might be buying Sydney Tower and the Harbour Bridge to create one big mind-controlling radio.

9. Skype, Skype for String

Another throwback to a low-tech solution came from Skype, who launched ‘Skype for String’. “All that you’ll need is two cups and a piece of string with a minimum bandwidth of 5mm. Skype for String will work with any cup and string, but for the best results, we suggest using a Skype certified set.”

10. Gmail – Gmail tap

Special mention to Gmail in the UK, who dreamt up Gmail Tap, a new way to use Gmail with only a two-button keyboard. “Tap into the future of productivity with Gmail Tap for Android and iOS. Double your typing speed with this revolutionary new keyboard.”

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Chris Erb is vice president of brand marketing for video game company EA Sports. We caught up with him the day after his keynote at ad:tech Sydney, in which he spoke on ‘Collaborations in a digital world’, detailing some of the partnerships, interactivity and social aspects to EA Sports’ portfolio.

Could you give us an intro to your role as VP of brand marketing?

I run the brand marketing across EA Sports, so we do the look, feel, tone, voice. We also do the licensing but really what’s key is the promotion stuff. We look at collaborations as a way to build awareness. It’s a very theatrical model, building relationships with brands, but we actually want to go much deeper than what the movie industries do. We want to build relationships with the brands – we have a lot of overlapping audiences, and so how do we find ways to rewards their customers, make them become our customers and get our customers to embrace theirs?

When we’re looking at partners, who’s the right authentic partner for sports? What’s the right brand that works around FIFA or basketball or football in the US? Who are the right authentic kinds of brands to work with?

Once you get that aligned on who the right people are, then it’s “Hey, how do you drive customer value or drive good experiences to the consumers through your partners?”

At ad:tech you spoke on ‘collaborations in a digital world’. What are some examples of collaborations EA Sports is involved with that also have a social aspect?

I think one of the good ones we talked about was Red Bull where they had Art of Flight [snowboarding film] coming out and we had SSX [snowboarding video game], and we had a great relationship with them already so we said “How do we collaborate on this?”

And we did so many different things, from retail signage, POS, letting them use our assets on POS at retail to taking [snowboarder] Travis Rice and making him an unlockable character within our game, which we give away on Facebook – the only way to get that code is through a tab that we had on Facebook where you enter and once we got so many people on there you get the unlockable code for Travis Rice, which is kind of a big deal – we had never had a professional athlete in SSX before.

That just shows a good overlap between the brands as well as when they did a tour of Art of Flight going from city to city, showing the movies, we had kiosks where people could play the games. In our game, we included codes for the Art of Flight movie that you could stream or get downloads from, and really share in our social media network. We’re a little over 19 million in our social network. Red Bull is even higher than that. We created some custom SSX videos with their athletes, with Travis Rice, that they could air on their channels that really felt like relevant content to their audience, not really marketing stuff, as well as us talking about things on our channel. When you look at that it shows you a bit of everything from a licensing standpoint to retail to PR to social media.

We try and do that stuff with lots of brands: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike. You’ve got to do something kind of cool – we’re not selling printed paper, it’s a cool industry, and it’s something that’s kind of fun. Our customers expect something cool, something that has a bit of swagger to it to make it feel cool, so how do we build programs like that?

One of the overall themes from the first day keynotes at ad:tech was content in marketing. For brands like EA Sports it seems a natural fit for brands like Coca-Cola to be present because they’d be in that environment in the real world. Do you have any advice on content marketing for smaller companies or companies that aren’t so interactive already?

I think it really depends on what that brand is trying to do. Not to talk about Red Bull again, but Red Bull is a media company, right? They make 200,000 hours of video a year. It’s a can of liquid awesomeness – a great can, but they’re a media company. It depends what brands really want to do; do they want to create compelling stories around their products or do they want to find partners that help them deliver that content to their customers.

Smart companies need to ask, “Hey, should we go out and create our own content or do we find the right content that’s relevant with our brands?” And I think once you make that decision – and that’s where EA Sports can come in – if you say we’re not in the space to create our own content but we want to deliver content to our consumers, and our customers are 18 to 34, great, video gaming is 18 to 34 in general, so what makes sense?  Is it Mass Effect?  Is it Need for Speed, or is it sports? From a smarter brand perspective, there’s no bigger industry in entertainment right now than what the gaming business is doing, so if you’re looking for content, if you’re looking for something that’s active, not passive and something that’s very compelling, I think the gaming space is the best space in the world.

Doritos in the US does really cool things about giving people early access to our exclusive content. One of the programs we did in the US is with a brand called Reeses candybars who doesn’t have any legal licences, so we did a program around EA Sports where you could save $10 on any EA Sports game with the purchase of the candy. So, again, it’s a way to dabble within sports without having a legal licence, which is kind of an interesting way to figure out the space that brand wants to play in.

With the rise of social media, digital, connectivity everywhere, is that an important part of your strategy?

Yeah, I think that you have to realise that social media is not a campaign, it’s a commitment and the basic fundamentals of marketing stay the same. Social is kind of overlaid and wrapped all around it. The coolest thing about yesterday [Ed’s note – Twitter conversations fly around ad:tech keynotes] was to be able to see the comments on Twitter and the stuff you were tweeting about the talk I gave and to instantly know what was relevant. I could see the comments that were relevant to you were relevant with someone else, and now I can go through my deck and find out what wasn’t relevant, what didn’t people talk about? So that instant  feedback loop was really amazing to see: “Okay, this was really relevant but nobody really cared about this kind of stuff”. It’s the same with the product.

When we look at our data we can see that in American football there’s a quarterback sneak, and in the real NFL it happens 32% of the time and in our games it only happens 3% of the time. Well, that’s obviously because it must not work so let’s go in and figure out why people aren’t doing it. Maybe the blocking is not right – how do we fix the blocking? Maybe we can get that percentage up so it feels more authentic, which is what we’re really about.

The technology within the game can do that and then Twitter and Facebook feeds are, “Hey, I really like this” or “Hey, you know what’s missing is this kind of thing.”  Five years ago we’d fly people down to our studio once or twice to get their feedback. Now it’s a 24 hour a day feedback loop. It changes market research, changes the way we talk about things.

And the messaging can go out in different ways. Social media is critical in the way we market the product, but also the way we develop it and the way we build consistent relationships. We’re sports fans, we feel like a really big company but how do we pull back the curtain and show we’re just like you guys, we just happen to work here but we love sports as much as you do and we’re just trying to do really cool things. Social media has really allowed us to humanise a lot of the faces around EA and say, “What do you like? What do you don’t like? And how do we address it?”

What was the rationale behind EA Sports opening retail stores in airports?

I think there’s a lot of cool things about the retail stores. It’s a licence deal so we have partners that manage stuff for us, and the idea is ‘how do we get video game controllers in people’s hands more often?’ And that’s really kind of what it’s all about – getting experiences with people. It’s a marketing play, so you build awareness of the brand within marketing by buying a poster and it’s a million dollars for a year. How are you going to build marketing around a really good experience for customers? We fly all the time. Flying can be tough. If we can have an oasis or a place where people can kind of go in and catch up on the scores of the games to be able to spend five or 10 minutes engaging with the brand, find out what’s new, it’s a cool kind of experience. Our goal is to build awareness and get more people’s hands on controllers and give a good experience to customers, and hopefully customers are feeling it’s a cool space.

How does social gaming fit into the EA Sports strategy?

Social gaming is really important, it’s a huge audience and the best way that we look at it is every kind of platform that people can game on now are going to want to have an experience where you can take your FIFA or Madden experience and be able to engage with it on every platform. The experience needs to be different on every platform: you’re not playing Madden on [a smartphone] like you would play it on your TV, but we think that you need to have a persistent relationship with your consumer over products. Social gaming brings new people into the category, and also extends your console experience across all those programs. It’s really critical for the things we’re doing.

At the core of it, we are a game company. I think games are just being experienced in different ways. You’re just not tethered to your couch anymore which you and I are probably used to. But now it’s kind of evolving – you can play anywhere, anytime.  You and I could literally play NBA Jam right now. So, being able to play games and connect with anybody in the world really opens it up to a 365 degree marketing program. It’s about having those relationships so you and I could talk about NBA Jam or I could say, “Hey, have you seen the new NHL game? It’s really cool. Let’s play.”

On collaborations, you mentioned that customer value is key to everything. How do you ensure that?

It’s really understanding what the customer value is – it’s different for different people. Value to some people is dollars off. Value to some people is making their experience better, so [the key is] really trying to understand for different [video game] franchises and different consumers. What does a partnership with McDonald’s mean? Is that a value play, and is Coca-Cola a content play?

When we’re trying to figure out partners, the definition of values is really what it means to that consumer and figuring that out and then aligning those programs with the right partners. Doritos is really about giving content experiences, so being able to pick the cover of Madden, being able to play Madden in 3D, those were key things about doing something that’s never been done before, number one; and then number two, it’s involving the consumers in the relationship with the brands. Our program with Reeses or, we have a hair salon in the US called Great Clips, it’s a dollars off play in a sweepstakes entry, so you can go and play golf anywhere in the world if you win the sweepstakes, but if you don’t, you’re saving five or 10 dollars on any of our EA Sports games. So, you just spent 10 dollars for a haircut and you’re going to save five or 10 dollars on an EA Sports game. For our audience, that’s going to seem relevant. It’s really finding out whether it’s value or content that consumers are really looking for, and then aligning those with the right brands.

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This is a guest post written by Dave Kurlan, a top rated speaker, best selling author, and sales development thought leader. His top-rated business blog, Understanding the Sales Force, is read by thousands of sales and marketing leaders.

The sales profession has come a long way — and I’ll venture to say that much of the changes have occurred as recently as the last 5 years. Technology adoption among consumers has picked up pace; marketers have changed their lead generation and engagement tactics to shift towards a less interruptive, more invitational focus; and sales professionals have had to adapt their sales methods to communicate with a consumer who has gotten better at dodging their calls. In fact, what Salesforce.com calls the Social Enterprise starts with developing a Customer Social Profile and interacting in modern ways. Let’s dive into how the sales game has changed in recent years, and the tools sales professionals have used with success to adapt to this new landscape.

How the Sales Game Has Changed

So just how much has selling changed in the last five years? Everyone has their own opinion, but I would say, “A lot!” Consider the following circumstances that were infrequent or nonexistent just a few years ago, and are now a constant scourge for sales and marketing professionals.

• The recent economic crisis changed the way that businesses and consumers spend money. We were embarrassed into controlling our discretionary spending, conducting more due diligence, and being more price-conscious. The result? There is considerably more resistance to what is being sold, while there is significantly less money available to spend.
• The internet has made information, once only available from salespeople, accessible to everyone with an internet connect or phone. The result? Salespeople are being invited into the buying process much later, are expected to present and propose, and then wind up chasing the business. There are remedies for this, but they aren’t simple to learn, and salespeople aren’t able to put them into practice without training and coaching help.
• Prospects don’t answer their phones or return calls anymore. The result? It’s more difficult than ever for salespeople to connect by phone, even when following up on inbound leads.

Tools and Technology Sales Professionals Use to Overcome These New Hurdles

That’s all of the bad news. But there’s good news to compensate for some of this: Sales and Marketing have started working in better alignment and finding tools to help get in contact with leads that are actually excited (or at the very least, not annoyed) to talk with them. In other words, successful salespeople have found a way to have a two-way conversation instead of a sales pitch using great new technology that has developed over the past several years. Here’s how they are doing it:

1) Utilize the nuanced features of LinkedIn. If you’re a B2B marketer, LinkedIn should be an invaluable source of lead generation for your business. LinkedIn has made it easier than ever to be proactive about getting introduced to new opportunities. Our clients use LinkedIn in several ways to get introduced to prospects that may be useful for you, too:

• Explore who your contacts know, and ask for introductions to people who fit your target audience.
• Reach out directly to 2nd- and 3rd-level contacts, referencing the 1st-level contact you have in common.
• Join groups where your target audience hangs out, answering questions, and contacting people who have issues with which you can help.
• Use LinkedIn Answers as a way to ask and answer questions; you’ll gain visibility and credibility and be able to identify people who have problems you can help solve.
• Reach out to members who have recently viewed your profiles and ask how they found you and what interested them about your profile.
• Congratulate 1st-level contacts who have updated their profiles — especially if they’ve changed jobs and/or companies — to learn about new opportunities for doing business together.
• Post links to your articles, blogs, events, and lead generating offers to drive site traffic and generate leads.

2) Don’t ignore the less popular social tools. I’ve found one of the most useful social sales tools to be Reachable.com, though there are certainly others that have worked wonders (share yours in the comments). In short, Reachable shows you how to get introduced to people you don’t know. Let’s say you have a business development deal that could appeal to, say, Tim Cook at Apple, but you don’t have an introduction to him. From inside Reachable, you enter your name and Tim’s name, and Reachable will instantly render a visual map of your network, showing people in your network that are between you and Tim, as well as the best route to take to get introduced.

3) Remember that blogging isn’t just for marketers. Some organizations think of business blogging as a marketing function, but if sales professionals write blog posts, they’ll instantly gain more credibility to prospects. It differentiates you from most salespeople who, instead of creating educational content, are spending time on the phones — that element of trust will help get you more call-backs. It also helps you generate better visibility; my own blog has more than 800 articles, so it becomes more and more likely, with each passing day, that one of my articles will turn up in somebody’s Google search results on queries related to my industry.

4) Leverage lead generating and lead nurturing tools. We use lead generation and nurturing tools like Hubspot’s inbound marketing software to make it easier to generate quality leads — but to do it, we stay dedicated to creating new blog content, lead gen offers, and optimized landing pages. As a result of the blogging platform and rich suite of analytical tools combined with our dedication to creating content and landing pages, our incoming leads have increased one hundred times over, going from 15 to around 500 leads per quarter. And when those leads are followed up with via email using targeted lead nurturing content, Forrester Research and Annuitas Group report that organizations can generate up to 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost — and those leads make 47% larger purchases, too.

5) Stay organized with a CRM. CRM tools like Salesforce.com and Landslide make it easier to memorialize, track, and stay on top of opportunities in the sales pipeline. Sales professionals using tools like these stay true to their sales process — the tool requires it — enter more relevant notes into the system because the fields have been predefined by Sales and Marketing, have much greater success with follow-up, and management has a dashboard that provides real-time statistics on the pipeline, its balance, movement, and forecast. The reports based on that information provide statistically accurate fodder for coaching and accountability.

6) Use video as a sales assist. Video content can feel more personal than written content, and it helps sales organizations tremendously as a follow-up content asset. While you can certainly leverage your YouTube channel, there are also professional video hosting sites like Wistia that allow you to manage your videos, embed compelling messages on your web site and even in your emails, so you can more effectively tell your story. We send links to prospective clients so they can view short but powerful and professional video clips to either get them engaged or continue a conversation.

7) Track prospect engagement with email attachments. Content tracking sites like Visible Gains allow you to measure how engaged prospects are with your email attachment content — key for sales people who rely on sending proposals and educational material that is often in PDF format. You can create personal pages for your prospects and instead of attaching files to your emails, you’ll send a link to the personal page you created for them and get insight into what they view, when they view it, and how often they return to it. Applications like this let you know exactly how engaged, interested, and serious your prospects are.

Have the Changes to Professional Selling Leveled Off?

No; actually, I anticipate there is still more change to come. The biggest change in the works is the great migration to inside sales. It’s far more efficient and significantly less costly to have an inside sales force rather than an outside sales force. But this transition isn’t a clean one. Certain business models generate customers that must see their salespeople on a very frequent basis. For others, being inside means they can reach 10 customers each day instead of two. For most companies then, the big challenge becomes not only whether to make this move to inside sales, but to what degree, and over what period of time. Even more important is what happens to the outside salesperson that is “moved” inside. Should that remote, outside sales person be replaced with a local, inside salesperson? Should that person simply work from their home office, or is that person relocated?

Despite a steady stream of sales professionals looking for work, there has been a recent decline in the availability of good sales talent. New strategies and tools for finding, attracting, interviewing, selecting, hiring, and on-boarding have become necessary just to fill existing openings before new positions can be constructed.

All in all, there has been tremendous change with more to come. If you manage a sales force and want to get ahead of the curve, you might be interested in attending my Annual Sales Leadership Executive Event.

Have you noticed a shift in the sales landscape, for better or for worse? Share what you’ve noticed and how you’ve coped with those changes.

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Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner is releasing his 2012 State of the Social Media Marketing Industry report today after his 1:00 PM EST webinar with HubSpot’s Content Strategist Kipp Bodnar, where the two will review all the juicy data. Part of Michael’s research included asking social media marketers whether they’re outsourcing any of their social media marketing tasks, and if so, what specifically they’re outsourcing. Turns out, in 2010, only 14% of marketers outsourced social media marketing. Last year, that number doubled to 28%. And this year, the percentage rose yet again, with 32% of marketers outsourcing social media.

It’s not exactly “news” that marketers are strapped for time, so when budget allows, it can be a huge relief to outsource activities to reputable agencies or contractors. But if you’ve spent any time on Twitter, you’ve probably seen more than your share of social media “experts,” “gurus,” and “ninjas.” In other words, it’s really easy for a marketer to get sucked in by contractors or agencies that might not be qualified to manage their social media presence.

So let’s break down the activities social media marketers have decided to outsource, and examine the pros and cons for outsourcing the most popular activities that show up on the list. That way, if you do decide to outsource, you know what to look out for so you actually see ROI on your outsourced social media spend.

What Social Media Marketers are Outsourcing in 2012

So, what are social media marketers outsourcing? Let’s take a look at the research from the report!

An interesting point of data the report uncovered is that social media marketers with 3 or more years of experience are 23% more likely to outsource design and development tasks than beginners. And according to another report we recently released — the State of the Online Marketing Services Industry — 83% of agencies offer social media services, with 7% planning to add it in the future.

So are these outsourcing choices a good idea? What troubles might a marketer encounter by outsourcing any of these tasks? If you’re considering a third party for any or all of these tasks, consider these pros and cons first that will help you do your due diligence.

Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Social Media Activities

Design and Development

Design and development is one of those tasks that often plagues marketers. Some of us are analytical, some are content creators, some are graphically inclined — a lucky few are all three. But it makes sense to seek a third party for design and development work who has more expertise in creating a beautiful design (just like you may have done for your website). More importantly, it’s one-time or infrequent work that doesn’t require ongoing maintenance. There’s relatively low risk in asking an agency, firm, or contractor to do your social media design and development.

Unless, of course, you are so active in social media that you’re making constant changes and updates. Social media is changing quite frequently — just look at the new Twitter brand pages, the evolution of Pinterest, Facebook’s new page layout, and the release of Open Graph applications. Visual content is becoming more important for a social media strategy, brand pages are gaining new functionality and changing layouts, and if you’re really sophisticated, you might be experimenting with Open Graph. If you’re truly leveraging all of the new updates that come out, it may make sense to have a designer or developer on staff to help you respond quickly. But, all in all, having design and development managed by a third party is quite low risk.

Analytics

The State of Social Media Marketing Report showed that the number one question asked by marketers — for three years in a row, actually — was how to measure the ROI of social media marketing efforts. If marketers aren’t sure how to do this, it’s no wonder social media analytics is being outsourced to a third party. The problem is, the success of this is largely reliant on two things: the tool being used, and the person analyzing the data.

We’re obviously a big fan of using our own software to analyze the effectiveness of our social media marketing, because it offers closed-loop reporting. That means instead of just looking at how many likes, follows, or retweets you receive, you not only know whether you’re generating leads from your social media networks (and on which networks you do so most effectively), but also whether those leads turn into customers, and at what rate.

But because marketers are so confused about how to measure social media’s ROI, it’s certainly easy to be duped into using an agency’s proprietary or third-party analytics tool that may have tons of fancy graphs, lots of numbers, and export complicated spreadsheets — but it really doesn’t tell you how to do anything actionable to improve your social media marketing with that data. So if you’re considering using a third party for social media analytics, make sure that their tool not only offers closed-loop reporting, but that the person analyzing the data can also tell you how to use that information to improve your marketing strategy.

Content Creation

You need content to fuel your social media strategy, but it requires a high time investment that many marketers don’t have — perhaps one of the highest time investments of anything on this list. So it makes sense that content creation is outsourced. Go for it! Hire someone to create great blog content, ebooks/whitepapers, videos, and infographics that will make your social media presence valuable for your followers!

But start slow — ask for some writing samples and test content before committing to a large content creation contract. Just like there are many social media ninjas out there, there are plenty of freelance writers that may create subpar content or leave you hanging on a deadline. We’ve written a blog post about how to screen freelance writers if you’re considering going that route; but if you hire an agency, it’s likely the writers have been screened in advance. Just make sure you ask for samples that relate to your industry before putting pen to paper.

Monitoring

Social media monitoring can be a laborious chore at best, and a distracting one at worst — depending on the size of your following and what you use social media for. HubSpot, for example, has a social media following across accounts of about 318,000. We use those accounts for publishing content, talking to followers, and customer service triage. And we keep monitoring in-house, because we’ve found a way to do so without taking up much of our day (which we’ve shared with you in our ebook about Monitoring Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day).

That being said, there are challenges that other businesses are faced with that make outsourced social media monitoring a logical solution. For example, international businesses or those that never really “close” may be receiving tweets 24/7. And it doesn’t look good when a serious customer service question can’t be answered in a timely manner, nor is it a pleasant working environment for a community manager who is constantly checking for customer service issues at all hours of the night. For businesses of this nature, outsourced monitoring makes sense — but only to agencies that truly understand your values and how you want to communicate with customers. We’ve covered what can happen when your agency doesn’t monitor social media for complaints in our post about AT&T’s Twitter SPAM snafu. If you choose to outsource monitoring, monitor your agency in the beginning, too.

Research & Strategy

I’ve combined “Research” and “Strategy” because, frankly, you can’t have one without the other. And just like social media analyzing is a common problem for marketers, many have also expressed confusion over how to create a social media strategy. The strategy is posting updates, right?

Wrong — and if you have an agency that is telling you that, run away fast. Posting updates is a tactic (which we’ll cover in the next section!) that helps you achieve a larger strategy. And a great consultant or agency will help draw that strategy out of you through diligent competitive and industry research, getting to know your business, and talking to you about your marketing and business goals. Then they should be able to outline a detailed plan for you about how to achieve that strategy — that either you, their staff, or another third party — can execute.

Is your consultant or agency asking you what your big picture goals are? Do you want to generate more leads, and think social media could help you do that? If so, what kind of leads? How will you nurture those leads after they’ve been generated? Or perhaps you need to improve your brand’s public image, and you think social media can help you do that. Will they be able to give you actionable advice on how to use social media as part of a larger branding strategy that differentiates yourself from your competitors and integrates with your other marketing activities? If these are the types of discussions you’re having with a third-party research and strategy provider, you have probably found a reliable consultant. But as we said before … beware the “ninjas” and “gurus” who can’t truly provide actionable advice that integrates with your larger marketing strategy.

Status Updates

Status updates are easy to integrate into your daily social media monitoring, especially if you take time out each week to schedule posts across all accounts using tools like HubSpot’s social media bookmarklet. If you’re already outsourcing your monitoring, ask if you can also integrate automated updating as a service. But this task is so simple to work into your day — especially since you’ll likely be publishing custom content, too — that a marketer on a budget could probably get more value spending their dollars elsewhere.

Community Management

While social media monitoring can be outsourced successfully when the proper protocol is in place, I believe community management is best left in-house — so I’m glad to see it as the least frequently outsources task on the list. While social media monitoring can simply be alerting the proper internal parties of a problem that arises on social media, community managers have a personal relationship with many members of their social media networks. Successful community managers identify influencers, get buy-in on controversial changes as a trusted member of the group, and often engage offline with many of their contacts.

The level of trust required to be a community manager is often diluted if fans and followers learn they’re dealing with an “outsider” from an agency. If you’re looking to fill a community manager position, your networks will have an easier time accepting someone from the inside.

Have you ever considered outsourcing any parts of your social media marketing, or are you currently doing so? Share your recommendations for properly vetting a third party in the comments!

Want to learn more about the report? There’s still a few minutes left to tune into today’s webinar at 1 PM EST. Register here!

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While several Internet users from all over the world — SEO practitioners or not — are scrambling to get their acts cleaned up to get through this supposed policing, we will focus on understanding what Google most likely meant by “over-optimization,” and discuss measures to be safe from penalties from future updates of this kind.

Risky SEO Tricks

Matt Cutts has already provided hints on what he and the other Google engineers had in mind, including a number of risky SEO tricks that are up for some evaluation. The following are some of the issues he mentioned:

1.  Exchange of Links

I link to you, you link to me. This has been one of the most prevalent link building strategies, and it is undeniable that it still works to this day. However, with some practitioners abusing this technique with automated link networks and reciprocal links, Google had to step up and do something about it. But people again found some ways out, such as using three-way link exchanges. So Google has to step in again.

There are a couple of things that Google could still look closer into, such as:

• unnatural links, or those that match too exactly with the anchor text, don’t appear naturally in the article, or look suspicious on the web;
• contrasting brands; and
• too many links added within a short period of time.

2.  Keyword Stuffing

Even casual browsers or someone doing Internet research are probably annoyed with them — those articles stuffed with keywords in almost every sentence just for the sake of getting a good rank in search engines. While an effective use of keyword density used to be one of the most efficient SEO strategies, it has to be noted that these days it is outdated and ineffective.

Site optimization is no longer measured by the number of times a keyword is mentioned in a web page. Google happened, and the scene underwent a dramatic change. The importance of links surfaced, and keyword count in a page was totally disregarded.

Google has been penalizing keyword-abusive pages for a couple of years now, and it probably plans to up its efforts by checking out page titles, where some SEOs insert their keywords or keyphrases to the detriment of actually telling you what the page is about.

Staying on the Clean and Safer Side

There are most probably some other things that Matt Cutts and his team intend to look into, and the question is how to free yourself of the worries of being penalized by using legitimate and effective SEO tactics.

The key is to think of people — the searchers — and not search engines. Day by day, Google gets smarter and smarter, becoming closer to how search engine users look for info and want their search results to be. Google’s goal is to be able to give searchers the most appropriate results, and how Google or search engines do it is where you have to start. Think about — How do people search? What do they want to find? How do search engines try to give them what they’re looking for? These are the three things you should begin anchoring your strategies on, not on search spiders.

So, how do we stay optimized while keeping safe from recurring optimization updates? Here are some ways:

• Take user intent into account — It pays to think of the users while doing SEO. Usually, search engine users go online for three common reasons: information, transaction, or navigation. Make sure to create content that provides for these three reasons: make your content educational, helpful, and easy to understand. Give them a glossary to show them the information that you have, add an FAQ page that they can go to for fast inquiries, and provide appropriate links to the service or product that they need.
• Focus on great content on a great site — Yes, how Google ranks pages still remains an SEO mystery, but there’s never any harm in producing well-written content with substantial information and correct grammar posted on a trusted and reputable site.
• Combine SEO with other methods such as user experience design and conversion optimization (CRO) — Make your site primarily user-friendly and not just search-engine-friendly. Give users what they want or expect to find, provide them with easy-to-read content, and add calls to action to facilitate conversion. Use various tests (e.g., user testing, A/B testing) and landing page optimization to ensure user-friendliness.
• Create social-media-friendly content — As part of prioritizing the users instead of search engines, write or create web content that can be shared, spread, and found in social media networks. Don’t limit yourself to keywords and title tags. Use headlines and content that invite even those who aren’t really searching for anything in particular, or those who are looking for something without a specific keyword in mind.

Again and again and again –  focus on people, not on search engines. Optimize your site like there’s no Google to think about. Focus on what users need and what they’re looking for. Give them that — clean and simple — and no matter how many optimization updates Google or any other search engine does, you’re safe and free to keep on going.

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As an email marketer, you already know you’re losing about 25% of your email list every year. It happens; people lose interest in your company, change email addresses, unsubscribe — it’s all part of the email marketing game. But what if there was something you could do to re-engage some of those subscribers who actually are still interested in your company, but have just suffered a case of inbox overload?

The way to do it is through an email re-engagement campaign, and it’s a pretty simple process once all the steps are broken down, your list segmentation parameters are set, and your content is created. This post will walk you through why email re-engagement campaigns are crucial to your email marketing program’s success, and exactly how you can implement one for yourself.

Why Email Re-Engagement Campaigns are Important

Before we dive in to the steps for implementing an email re-engagement campaign, I want to make sure it’s clear why a re-engagement campaign is a good best practice to include in any email marketing program. People on your email list could become inactive for a number of reasons (which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section of this post):

• You’re going into their SPAM folders.
• They just haven’t gotten around to unsubscribing yet.
• You’re emailing them too much, so they gloss over your name.
• You’re not emailing them enough, and they forgot who you are.
• They just subscribed for a one-time perk, like a coupon or freebie.
• They subscribed to complete a one-time or infrequent transaction, like filling a yearly contact prescription, for example.
• Your emails don’t provide value for them.
• Your emails weren’t what they thought they would get when signing up.

And there are many, many other reasons your email subscribers could have gone inactive. The thing is, some of these can be remedied, meaning there’s revenue potential out there in your email list that is sitting untapped.

But even if there was absolutely no potential for new leads, reconversions, or customers in the inactive portion of your email list, keeping them on your email list puts your email deliverability at serious risk. Not only does every email you send offer them the opportunity to mark you as SPAM, but it also makes your email metrics look pretty bad to your boss. For example, wouldn’t you like to have a higher deliverability and click-through rate to show off? You can have that and a better sender reputation when you trim down the inactives on your list and focus on only emailing the engaged subscribers!

How to Start an Email Re-Engagement Campaign

Now that we’ve covered why email re-engagement campaigns are important, let’s break down the steps you need to take to run one for yourself.

Step 1: Define What Success Looks Like

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re probably not surprised by this first step. If you don’t have an idea of what success looks like, it’s hard to tell if you’ve accomplished your goal. The thing is, metrics for success in your first email re-engagement campaign are really tough to come up with, because the benchmarks are so different based on your industry and business model. Once you make these campaigns a regular part of your email marketing program, however, you’ll start to notice a pattern around:

• The percentage of email addresses you remove from your list as a result of the re-engagement campaign,
• The percentage of inactive subscribers that become re-engaged, and
• How much your click-through rate improves after the re-engagement campaign

But if this is your first re-engagement campaign, adjust your mindset around the campaign metrics — because they can look bleak with the wrong perspective. What I mean by that is this: you know you’ve run a successful re-engagement campaign when you have a smaller email list. That’s a tad cringe-worthy, right?

Well, it’s not so bad when you consider the end result. For example, HubSpot customer Bob Phibbs — the Retail Doctor — figured out that though his truly engaged email list was half the size of his email list that included inactive subscribers, it resulted in 3X more unique clicks. Email re-engagement campaigns give you an email list that is far more engaged, yields a higher click-through rate, drives more conversions and customers, and improves your email deliverability.

Step 2: Identify Your Inactives

Like we discussed before, someone can be inactive for a number of reasons. And here’s the thing — there’s no one definition for what inactivity means that fits all business models. You’re going to need to utilize a mixture of discrete metrics and business-specific information to make the final determination for the definition of an inactive subscriber. But let’s walk through exactly how to make that determination for yourself right now.

First, consider the length of your buying cycle. For example, let’s say one of the products a business sells is contact lenses, and they notice there is a certain portion of their customers who purchase a yearly supply of contact lenses, well, yearly. The contact lens email marketer may not be emailing that segment of their email list because they take a very specific action — they transact once a year and don’t require monthly, weekly, or daily emails. But an e-retailer like ModCloth (whose email marketing I’ve featured on this blog a few times), would have much different parameters for inactivity; they email much more frequently because their subscribers interact with the brand more frequently and in more diverse ways.

So while a rule of thumb for defining inactivity is often 3-6 months, look at your business model and ask: am I a “contact lens retailer” for whom 3-6 months of inactivity is normal, or am I a “ModCloth-type e-retailer” for whom even 1 month of inactivity is a bad sign? Or, of course, something in between.

(Tip: If you find there are people on your email list who have been inactive for years (unless you truly have a several-years long buying cycle), don’t include them in the re-engagement campaign, as they will drive up SPAM complaint rates. Just remove them from your list altogether.)

Once you have an idea of what a normal time span for inactivity looks like, mix it with a discrete metric to segment out your inactives. I recommend click-through rate, as it is a much better indication of engagement than open rate, but not so high-commitment as completing a transaction or filling out a landing page form.

Be sure to create different list segments if you plan on sending re-engagement campaign content that is specific to, say, a particular buyer persona. For example, if you’re the contact lens retailer but you also sell glasses frames online, you might create three separate re-engagement campaign list segments — one for your recipients who purchase contact lenses, one for your recipients who purchase glasses frames, and one for your recipients who purchase both. This will allow you to create more targeted content that increases the likelihood your campaign actually does re-engage some subscribers.

Step 3: Create & Send Your Engagement Campaigns

Some companies have sent one email that asks people to make a decision — click through a call-to-action on our email now, or we’re taking you off our list! And for some companies, that approach may work. But let’s start slower, shall we?

Think of your re-engagement campaign as, well, a campaign. That is to say there will be a series of emails you’re sending over several weeks to try to re-engage your inactive subscribers, not a batch and blast. This is recommended primarily because many of your inactives have suffered some kind of communication breakdown with you along the way that has caused the value of your emails to be lost. It’s only natural that it may take more than one email to find the value proposition that causes them to change their minds about your emails.

To help you fill out your email campaign, here are several effective types of re-engagement emails that businesses often send.

• Update Email Preferences: Offer to change the frequency of the emails you send or to customize the subject matter about which your recipient receives emails. This helps recipients that are struggling with inbox overload.
• Email Feedback Survey: Ask your subscriber if there is something you can do to improve your email content to make them engage more frequently. Worst case scenario, you get feedback on your content. What marketer doesn’t love feedback?
• Incentivize Email Activity: Offer freebies or coupons for re-opting in to your email list, but make sure it’s based on their past purchase or download history. For example, if I noticed a segment of my list was particularly interested in educational inbound marketing content, I might invite them to attend our Inbound 2012 conference with a discount for certification at the conference.
• Get Emotional: You’ve probably received an email or two from a company that says how much they miss you. Maybe it doesn’t strike a chord with everyone, but it can be pretty refreshing to hear a company talk to you like a human being.
• Use a Deadline: Best reserved for the last email of your re-engagement campaign, this email graciously asks recipients to opt in by a certain date or be removed from the email list. Sometimes the deadline is enough of an impetus to get a subscriber to confirm that they do or don’t want to receive your emails. Be sure to make it easy for them to provide a response; say something like, “Yes, please keep me subscribed!” and “No, please remove me from your email communications.”

There are other elements you may decide to test as you become more sophisticated with running re-engagement campaigns. For example, you could experiment with increasing or decreasing the frequency of your email sends to see if certain segments respond positively to the change in frequency. You may also notice that the format of your emails could benefit from some A/B testing — perhaps your emails are typically quite text heavy, and your inactive subscribers may be more interested in short and snappy emails. You may even need a more “out there” subject line that more effectively grabs the attention of your inactive subscribers.

After you’ve established some baseline metrics for comparison from your first few re-engagement campaigns, experiment with more radical changes like these. You may just find a diamond email marketing idea in the rough!

Step 4: Reduce Future Instances of Inactive Subscribers

Just because you’ve completed your re-engagement campaign, doesn’t mean you’re done! The success of your next re-engagement campaign (and your email marketing program) depends on your ability to keep your currently healthy and engaged list … well, healthy and engaged. Make sure you’re doing these things to proactively keep your email list active:

• Set clear expectations in the opt-in process about email sending frequency, subject matter, and the content types they’ll receive. This will decrease the instances of subscribers thinking they’ll receive a certain type of email, only to be disappointed when they realize there was a misunderstanding later down the road.
• Make your first email really, really awesome — and send it right away. Often, the first email sent after a new subscriber opts in is a confirmation email. Use that opportunity to impress your newest subscriber with an enticing offer or interesting piece of content that will hook them, and set them up to be excited for every future email you send. In other words, strike while the iron’s hot.
• Adapt your lead nurturing content based on list segments. This doesn’t mean you have to create completely new content for every single list segment — but often, your content assets can be better targeted for each individual list segment. We’ve written a blog post that will help you adapt your content assets so your email content is far more targeted, resulting in happier email subscribers.
• Keep refining your list segments based on their on- and off-site behaviors. The more you communicate with your leads, the more you’ll know about them. If you use this information to continually refine your list segments and email content, you’ll be able to provide a more customized experience that results in more engaged email subscribers.

What tactics do you use to re-engage email subscribers?

Image credit: Alan Cleaver

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You’ve seen tons of articles raving about it.

How it’s driving more traffic than anything in the known universe. How you need to be “pinning” and have “pinnable stuff” or you’re going to fail at this magical new social network. How it’s the greatest thing since, well, the last greatest thing.

And you want someone to be straight with you. So here’s the truth …

Pinterest traffic is worthless.

But so is all traffic — unless you do something with it.

Seeing patterns that aren’t there

The problem with most of what’s being written about Pinterest traffic is that it’s pointing out the wrong things. What passes for “reporting” is someone opening Google Analytics, seeing a spike in referrals from Pinterest, and writing an “OMG! Lots of Traffic” post.

Very few are taking the time to do any due diligence on the larger picture.

Are people clicking through, or is the “traffic” just a remote call to the pinned image? Where are your visitors going? What are they doing? Does the traffic convert?

You have to ask real questions, and look for real answers, not patterns based on what others think they’re seeing.

And the wonderful thing about running a business online is that almost everything is testable, trackable, and adjustable.

What’s really going on with Pinterest traffic?

Data doesn’t lie (at least when you’re using it correctly).

Understanding your data — traffic, patterns, and conversions — is critical to your content marketing strategy. Especially when it comes to a new traffic source.

At Copyblogger Media, much of what we do is guided by data — traffic patterns, market analysis, feedback, customer input, and conversion scenarios.

And the increased Pinterest traffic we receive is treated no differently.

We watch, track, analyze, and correlate to figure out how best to capitalize on this new traffic source. Here are a few things we’ve discovered …

Traffic:

• In the last three months (Jan 1-Mar 28), Pinterest helped traffic grow on each of our sites.
• For Copyblogger, Pinterest was the #3 referring website, bested only by Facebook and Twitter.
• Between January 1st and March 5th, when the 15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly infographic was posted, Pinterest sent close to 15,000 visits. Based on the number of times it was pinned, this told us that fewer than half of the people who pinned the image actually clicked through.
• In the week following that infographic, Pinterest sent 2.7 times as much traffic as the three months before.
• Individual post activity seems to hold a long shelf life when it’s popular on Pinterest. Often, a tweet is lifeless within a day, where a pin can continue pulling traffic for weeks after being published.
• During this same three-month period, Pinterest was the #29 referring site for StudioPress.
• While the amount of raw Pinterest traffic — the number of visits — is smaller for StudioPress than for Copyblogger, visitors to StudioPress stay much longer and visit more pages on average. For example, the average visit duration for a Pinterest-referred visitor on Copyblogger is 0:00:32, compared to an average of 0:05:28 on StudioPress.
• Pinterest visitors check out 1.16 pages on average after clicking through to Copyblogger, compared to 6.34 pages on StudioPress.
• The bounce rate for Pinterest visitors on Copyblogger averages out to 91.7%, StudioPress is 49.9% on average. This is much higher than our site averages, and higher than most other traffic sources.

Visitor Flow:

• Infographic pins have exceptionally high bounce rates and very short visits, usually less than a minute. However, other pins (such as the 56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest post) that led to straight copy had much longer visits and lower bounce rates.
• On that Pinterest marketing post, the majority went on to the main page, followed by the Internet Marketing for Smart People, Genesis, and SEO site quality pages.
• On days when Pinterest activity was particularly high, traffic increased to each of our product sites from Copyblogger.
• 89.6% of Pinterest-referred visitors to Copyblogger were new to the site. Only 44.4% of Pinterest referrals on StudioPress brought new visitors.
• The StudioPress top Pinterest-pulling post included an infographic about How Developers are Driving the Business Adoption of WordPress.
• The vast majority of other StudioPress popular pins were all themes or showcase websites. These pins, on average, showed very low bounce and exit rates, with most continuing on to the themes page, the showcase, the blog, or the features page.
• On average, they also showed fewer new visitors, which historically correlates with low bounce rates on our properties.

OK, so what does all of this mean for you?

In short, it means:

For example, we’ve optimized certain pages on Copyblogger to drive visitors to our list and product pages. We’ve found that the traffic from Pinterest can be also driven to those sources, if a clear call to action is present.

On StudioPress, optimizing showcase pages to drive traffic to the related themes has shown an increase of on-page time and conversions — especially for repeat visitors.

So, even though the traffic from Pinterest for StudioPress was much lower than for Copyblogger, the overall bounce rate was also lower, on-page time was higher, and conversions were better because the path was more predictable.

Armed with that data, we can better utilize the traffic on all of our sites through tracking and testing.

And so can you.

Our analysis shows us a number of best practices for converting Pinterest traffic:

• Infographics and smaller images command more click-throughs because they’re unreadable from the Pinterest site.
• Infographic headlines are key to getting people to click through.
• Compelling subjects covered with too-small-for-Pinterest font choices are ideal.
• People who do move around your site upon arrival will likely follow a predictable path (for example: a showcase theme pin leads to a page path that is more likely to start with the themes gallery than the blog).
• You can control how traffic responds by making a specific call to action on your pin’s landing page.
• Longer visits on pins that bring repeat traffic is an important metric, since on commerce-driven sites you may need to get someone to your page a few times before they buy.
• Pinterest doesn’t sell stuff — you do. By funneling the traffic properly, you can convert visitors into customers.

Traffic from any source is only worthwhile if you have specific goals for it. You can use Pinterest for customer engagement, personal branding, or as an entry point to your conversion funnel.

But you need to understand what your traffic is doing in order to accomplish those goals. That’s where your data comes in. (And if you’re looking for a place to start, try Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics: An Hour A Day).

So is Pinterest traffic worthless? That’s up to you to find out.

Major props to Jessica Commins for her valued assistance with the data recon.

About the Author: Tony D. Clark is the COO of Copyblogger Media. You can follow him @nestguy on Twitter if you’re into the whole brevity thing.

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The Hill’s hoist, cochlear implant, plastic money, invitro-fertilisation and dual flush toilets are among Australia’s great innovations. But who knew that five pioneering scientists from the CSIRO were responsible for the invention of wireless technology? By the time its patents expire, WiFi will be used in an estimated five billion devices.

The CSIRO first sought to patent its wireless technology in the early 1990s. Since that time it has embarked upon two landmark court cases for patent infringement in the United States.

The first trial settled a few years ago for just over $205 million. This week it was reported that the CSIRO and Commonwealth Government settled the second of those cases, this time against several laptop makers, mobile carriers and wireless chip makers for $220 million.

While the CSIRO and government are reportedly satisfied with the $400 million they have recouped thus far from commercialising their intellectual property, around 40% of the world’s WiFi-using devices will not be covered by the patent because CSIRO neglected to protect the invention in emerging markets including Russia, Latin America, China and India.

That enormously expensive oversight serves as a reminder to individuals and businesses that have a product, device, business method, apparatus, or computer-based software or process worth protecting.

In Australia there are two different types of patent:

1. Standard patents provide 20 years protection and are appropriate for inventions that are manufactured, novel, useful, and possess a sufficient level of inventiveness, and

2. Innovation patents provide eight year protection and are available for inventions that do not meet the higher inventive threshold required for standard patents. To register an innovation patent, the invention must be different from what is already known, and that difference must make a substantial contribution to the working of the invention.

Importantly, in light of CSIRO’s experience, patent protection should be applied for in each additional country of interest. An application can be filed in each country, or in multiple countries under a single application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty and European Patent Convention.

The best advice is to seek legal advice.

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Early adopters of tablet advertising are failing to make use of the medium’s interactive abilities and few are taking into account the impact of orientation changes between portrait and landscape, according to an analysis of magazine app ads conducted in the US.

The research, conducted by Kantar Media, found that the majority of the tablet magazine ads are near replicas of their print counterparts, and many are not tailored for orientation changes, rendering them less effective when the tablet is rotated.

Kantar Media monitored around 150 magazines, selected based on top print revenue, top digital spend, and top grossing magazine iTunes apps, since November 2011 and conducted an analysis on magazine ads that ran throughout January 2012 and February 2012 in a subset of 52 publications. As of February 2012, 110 of the top publishers analysed had an iPad app, 65 of which had iPad-specific editions with exclusive digital content.

In an indictment on the creative industry’s innovativeness, the analysis found that most ads did not take advantage of the iPad’s interactivity, being ads that were originally print edition creative repurposed for tablets. Only a handful of the ads examined made use of animations or advanced interactive features, other than links to the advertisers’ websites or social media pages. Those that did were primarily found in publications such as Wired or Popular Science that target a more tech-savvy audience.

Furthermore, few advertisers took orientation change into account, with the majority of ads containing the same product, text and images, with only slight variations in positioning and cropping when the tablet was rotated. In some cases the reader was required to scroll or swipe to view the full ad. The ability for advertisers to tailor ads for the orientation was diminished however by the fact that over half of the iPad apps analysed did not provide both portrait and landscape options for the creative.

The report gives Honda’s CR-V ad, which changes its headline, background artwork and product shot when the iPad is rotated, as an example of tailoring to orientation change.

Some advertisers however are taking full advantage of the tablet format, with a small group of ads containing overlays to view additional information. Converse’s ads below included two calls to action: a tap for product details and a shop now step which redirected users to a Bloomingdale’s shopping page.

There were a limited number of ads containing interactive games or digital video, with notable exceptions from American Airlines, which ran an ad containing a link to a digital video in Wired Magazine’s tablet app, Tic Tac which ran an ad where music plays when the user shakes the iPad. and Scion, which ran an execution also in Wired’s app that allowed readers to access image galleries, video, animation and movement-based features.

The analysis also found that more than 90% of tablet advertisers were current print advertisers with the publication, presumably as publishers take new ideas to existing customers. The report reads, “We interpret this high duplication rate as the established base of print edition advertisers serving as low hanging fruit for initial experiments.”

Tablet uptake is on a steep curve in Australia, predicted to reach 39% of the households by the end of the year according to Nielsen, and is generating growing interest among advertisers as a serious platform for reaching consumers.

Image credit: Kantar Media.

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