Carolyn Hasenfratz's Blog

Multi channel marketing is more important than ever before. Your audience is becoming increasingly segmented, and you have to open up more channels in order to be where the action is. Do you remember when just having a web site set you apart from the competition? Adding Facebook or Twitter to your multi channel mix used to be a cutting edge move - now social media applications have become so entrenched that Tweets like this one I saw this morning are possible - "Websites vs Facebook Pages: which URL should you promote?"

Social media applications, email accounts, blogs, web sites, shopping carts, payment gateways, CMSs, CRMs - all of these channels need feeding with new content and/or monitoring to make sure you are engaging with your audience and taking advantage of opportunities. You don't want an important email to languish in a little-used account, a sold merchandise item to go unshipped, a new lead ignored, or a question posted to a blog or Facebook page to go unanswered. How does one remember to check up on all these channels?

Most of the time when your applications need attention, you will get an alert email, but you can't count on getting all the emails you should. Email delivery is a real problem these days, even delivery of emails that you have made it very clear are wanted. To help me keep track of what I need to check on every day, I have made an html page and links to all of my email accounts, shopping carts, payment gateways, and social media applications. There is a shortcut to it on my desktop so it's always handy.

Here at Webinar Resources, I've made a similar page in a password protected area that our whole team can refer to for similar information, plus links to other things we need such as individual contact information, login pages for various hosted services that we use, and links to information important to our collective knowledge. It's a great convenience and time-saver. If you don't have such a resource for yourself, I recommend you make one or ask your web developer to create an admin page tailored to your needs.

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In my last blog post, I discussed ways of getting people to sign up for an e-newsletter. Now I will talk about how to help make sure your e-newsletter or other email sendings actually get to the people who want them.

ISPs are understandably on a mission to block the emails people don't want, and to let in the emails their customers do want. Many spam emails do get blocked through their efforts, but unfortunately some legitimate emails also get blocked accidentally. As a sender, you might know what the official definition of spam is, but to an end user, spam might just mean something they aren't interested in right now. Did you know that some users use the report spam button as a way to unsubscribe from a sending they no longer want instead of using the unsubscribe link provided in the email? Did you know that some email recipients use the report spam button on their email client as a delete key? Did you know that you can even get banned for being on the same ISP as someone else whose emails were labeled as spam, either rightly or wrongly? It's unfair, but it is possible to get on banned lists without ever doing anything wrong. The retail holiday season we're in now brings an increase in commercial email traffic, and with it more potential false spam reports as people get impatient with all the email they're getting.

What can be done to help make sure your emails are getting to your customers, and your customers' emails are getting to you? Here are some suggestions:

1. If you use forms on your web site, test them using multiple email addresses from different domains. You might find that your forms will accept emails from some domains and not others. If that happens, contact your site's host for help.


2. On the success pages and acknowledgement messages from your forms, suggest that users add your email address or addresses to their approved senders lists (whitelists).


3. Check all the email links on your web site periodically to make sure you actually get the emails. In addition, make a list of all the email accounts you have, with login information, and keep the list in a safe place. Check the spam folders on all of them on a regular basis. Many email accounts will stop working when the spam folder or the trash folder gets full. Also some legitimate emails might be caught by your spam filter, so you'll want to add those email addresses to your lists of approved senders. Some customers will try another way to contact you if they don't get an answer from your email, but most will just give up.


4. Have your web developer program an appropriate subject line in capital letters into all the email links on your site. Although use of all caps is something I normally stay away from, in this case I do use them because it makes the emails sent from my web site much easier to distinguish from all the spam.

Consider not having your email forwarded from one account to another, but getting all of it right from the source. The article Tips to avoid getting your server blocked by Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail explains why.


5. Examine your email sendings, including acknowledgement messages from forms, for characteristics that might cause them to be mistakenly flagged as spam. The following resources provide helpful guidelines:
   • Gmail Bulk Senders Guidelines
   • AOL Sender Best Practices
   • Hotmail Guidelines
   • Yahoo! Mail Best Practices
   • Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group Sender Best Communications Practices
   • Why My Emails Get Blocked or Filtered: Causes and Solutions Inside 
   
   Some email sending software, such as ExactTarget, has a built-in content checker that will alert you to possible problems in the text of your email, such as "Click here" or "Free".


6. Only send to engaged recipients. Believe it or not, some major ISPs are starting to flag messages as spam just because the end user doesn't open them. Consider sending periodic updates to subscribers to verify if they still want to be on your subscriber list.


7. Open up other channels to help compensate for the people you're not reaching by email, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, a Webinar for One Brainshark presentation, text messaging, and voice messaging. At Webinar Resources we use ExactTarget's social forward feature to add social media links to our customers' emails to drive customer acquisition.

In a previous blog post, Why Aren't Customers Signing Up For My E-Newsletter?, I speculated why few people who buy products from my e-commerce site, Carolyn's Stamp Store, have been agreeing to subscribe to my newsletter during the customer sign-up process. I decided to think about what might make potential subscribers wary, and do a better job of addressing their concerns:

• Will I give or sell their email address to someone else?
• Will the newsletter be interesting or valuable to them?
• Will they be able to unsubscribe if they decide they no longer want it?
• Will they be bombarded with a lot of email?

If you haven't read my previous article yet, you might want to look at it to learn exactly what changes I made in my signup process.

Enough time has gone by now to see if the new improved process had the desired effect of getting more newsletter subscribers. I looked at data from new customer signups for an equal amount of days before and after, and was pleased to find out the following:

	Old Sign-Up Process	New Sign-Up Process
Rate of customers opting in to e-newsletter	5%	32%

Wow, that's a significant increase! Now I should be in a position to retain more of my most engaged customers by sending them information that they want to receive.

Mark and I returned from Indianapolis Thursday evening  after attending "Connections '09: Success by Design", a one-to-one marketing conference where we learned a lot of new information about email marketing, social media integration, email + SMS, video in email, personalized marketing campaigns, and much more. In the future we'll be blogging about how we're using the new concepts and techniques that we have learned.

I haven't always done the best job after a conference or trade show of absorbing everything I learned and keeping up with the contacts I made. I was determined to do a better job this time of taking advantage of the opportunity afforded me and our company, by doing the following as quickly as possible after my return home while things were still fresh in my mind:

1. I put my photos from the trip into an album on Facebook and announced the link in our Webinar Resources Twitter feed, as well as my own personal social media tools.

2. I entered the contacts I made into my database and emailed all of them a link to the photos.

3. I organized all the takeaway information from the conference and retyped my handwritten notes (20 pages worth!), cross checking and adding urls to resources whenever appropriate. There were lots of whitepapers, slide presentations, blog posts and other resources to keep track of, and putting links to them in my notes I think will help me remember the context and get more out of the information.

4. I made an action item list of all the ideas I picked up for improvements to make to our marketing materials and strategies.

5. I posted my notes and links to pertinent materials on our private company portal, and sent a notice to all of our team members, so they can benefit from what I have learned.

What do you do after a trade show or conference to help you retain all the new information you have consumed?

Do you publish an e-newsletter as part of your customer acquisition program? Are you pleased with how many subscribers you're getting, or disappointed?

If you're not getting as many subscribers as you'd like, it might help to think about some of the factors that might make potential subscribers reluctant to give you their email address.

• They fear that you will give or sell their email address to someone else
• They don't know what benefit they will get from your newsletter. Do they get something free for signing up? Is the content valuable?
• They worry that that they won't be able to unsubscribe if they decide they no longer want it.

On my personal e-commerce site, www.carolynsstampstore.com, I've noticed that the vast majority of people who buy things from me do not choose to receive my e-newsletter. One would think that if someone is interested enough to make a purchase, more of those people would want to become subscribers. What am I doing wrong?

The shopping cart software I use, osCommerce, requires customers to create a profile in order to complete a purchase. Customers can select whether or not to receive an e-newsletter during the sign-up process. I decided to pretend that I am a new customer and fill out the form to refresh my memory of what the customer sees - something I haven't done since I first set up the site.

In the box where I ask if they want the newsletter, I had links to the first three issues and the checkbox to select to opt in is worded "Sign up for Carolyn's Newsletter". There was no description of what the newsletter is about, so I have added the following descriptive paragraph:

The Carolyn Hasenfratz Design and Carolyn's Stamp Store E-Newsletter is sent to your inbox around 6-8 times a year and features articles by Carolyn about rubber stamping techniques and projects, as well as online marketing and other business tips. You will also be updated on my sales and specials, free template downloads, new products, and show appearances. Click here to view my privacy policy.

In that paragraph I have attempted to answer potential concerns that customers might have about getting yet another newsletter in their already crowded inbox. "Is this newsletter of interest to me?" "How many emails will I get?" "Is it easy to unsubscribe if I change my mind?" I also changed the wording of the call to action to "Sign up for Carolyn's Email Newsletter - check box if yes"

What do you think - can I look forward to an increase in the number of customers who subscribe? We'll see!

One of the things we all love about the Internet is all the free stuff available for download. For the profit-minded, there are good reasons to make quality, helpful content available on your web site for free. Useful content gives you credibility in your field and helps to build long-term relationships with prospects. If your content is popular, you can generate revenue through advertising. If your content contains text, there are lots of good keywords for search engines to latch onto. Another benefit of good content is that it attracts incoming links, sometimes called "link bait". In checking the external links for one of my sites on which I sell craft supplies, I can see that by far the most popular individual pages are those that contain project tutorials or free templates. Given that incoming links help your site in the organic search results, and that search marketing has a very high ROI in a time when advertising budgets might be shrinking, having quality content that people want to link to is a huge advantage.

I put my web site address on the free templates available for download on one of my web sites so that users will be reminded of my business every time they see the template. Don't overlook the possibility of placing your content on specialized portals so that people who have never been to your site have the opportunity to be exposed to your content. Be sure to embed information about your company within that content. Just to name a few examples, there are portals for articles, blogs, Illustrator files, movies and RSS feeds. If you publish a Brainshark presentation, there are two types of portals provided in which you can make your content available for free or for a fee. Click here to view Webinar Resources' Brainshark content portal. Brainshark is a powerful tool that you can use to turn PowerPoint slides into multimedia presentations with many powerful features including viral marketing capability.

By giving a little, you could gain a lot!

If the content you provide on your web site or blog is of high enough quality, people will be eager to share it with others and do some of your marketing work for you. Those with their own web sites might go to the trouble of editing one of their pages to add your link. To make the task easier and to encourage more linking, many webmasters have provided code and sometimes an image for interested persons to use. I think that is still a good idea, I don't know if anything beats a good old-fashioned hard-coded link in the search engines. Fortunately with the rise of social media there has come an even easier way to encourage site visitors to spread the word about your content.

This morning I signed up for an AddThis account. AddThis is a free bookmarking/sharing service than enables you to create a button or chicklet that empowers your site visitors to print your content, email it, or best of all send a link to the social networking service of his or her choice. It's similar to the Share This link you see right below this blog post you're reading. Would you like to have that capability to leverage your own content that you've worked so hard on? Just go to the AddThis site and follow the super-easy instructions. You don't have to register to get a button, but I did so that I could receive the additional service of analytics. What a great way to see which content is the most popular!

"Doing Well by Doing Good" is a phrase used in a slightly derisive manner to describe the actions of someone who benefits his or herself while doing something for a charitable cause. In a more positive light, you could refer to this practice by another well known phrase, a "Win-Win Situation".

I found a really good example on the soapmaking supply retailer From Nature With Love's Soap Donations page. Customers of From Nature With Love are invited to donate some of their handmade soaps to two domestic violence shelters and one homeless shelter. In return, they get a listing with a link on a donor's thank you page and the right to display a banner on their site that links back to the thank you page on From Nature With Love's site.

This is a very smart marketing program for several reasons. Web-savvy soap makers get a link from a high profile site to their own sites, which helps them greatly in the search engines. They also help build a good image with their own web site visitors by advertising their charitable act. From Nature With Love gets a boost in the search engines by having participants in the program link back to them, and the keywords contained in the donor listings are good for their search engine presence as well. And people who are down and out, perhaps at the lowest points of their lives, get to enjoy a handmade luxury personal care product, a small thing but speaking as someone who enjoys handmade personal care products myself, a potentially significant morale-booster that is good for physical and mental health. Not just a "Win-Win-Situation", but a "Win-Win-Win Situation"!

A few days ago, Mark and I were discussing ways to try to interact with a company that we would like to do business with. The company's web site sported chicklets for Twitter, Facebook and You Tube, letting us know that they were accessible via these social media services. More and more companies are adding social media applications to their communications toolkit, because it makes sense to have a presence in multiple channels so that a prospect can communicate with you via the channel of his or her choice. Many of us here at Webinar Resources have had individual Facebook accounts for awhile. We decided it was time to have a company profile on Facebook, so I started one. I'm sure we will think of ways to use it as we go, but one of our very first acts was to use it to invite visitors to register for an upcoming webinar presented by one of our clients. Come visit us on Facebook by clicking here:

Some time ago, I was given a stack of books by two former teachers of mine who were getting ready to move to another state and trying to lighten the load. One of the titles was "Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation" by Don Tapscott. Written in 1998, at the height of the Internet boom and also the year I started working in the industry professionally, it reflects the heady optimism of those times and the feeling I remember having every day as I went to work that we were participating in a revolution that would have as great an effect on people's lives as the Industrial Revolution did. The book's primary focus is on the generation just younger than my own Generation X, Generation Y, which the author proposes renaming the Net Generation or N-Gen because growing up with the digital media and the Internet is their defining characteristic. How will the N-Gen change the way we learn, play, work, shop, and live as a result of having developed with
this technology?

The author argues that one of the things that is changing is that knowledge is becoming capital. The competitive  advantages that once went to the companies with the most money or equipment will in the future go to companies with the most knowledge. "There is no sustainable competitive advantage today other than organizational learning. That is, companies can compete only if they can learn faster than their competitors."

If this is true, how can businesses make sure that they are fostering a healthy environment in which learning can take place?

Technology is certainly a big help. At Webinar Resources, we use software such as Xerox Docushare, Google Spreadsheets, and Content Circles to organize documents and make them available to all the employees who need them. We use technology such as Brainshark Presentations and ExactTarget emails to help our clients distribute and archive their important knowledge.

At least as important as technology in my opinion is the organizational attitude toward learning and collaboration. At Webinar Resources we have a culture that allows knowledge to flourish. Knowledge flows from the top of the hierarchy down, from bottom to top, and from peer to peer. Employees are encouraged to write up instructions for whatever new techniques we've learned and upload them to our online knowledge base. All employees are allowed to contribute to the shared knowledge of the organization and enjoy doing it (I do anyway). Employees are expected to teach each other, and are given tools and resources for self-directed learning as well.

Contrast this kind of culture with a workplace that you may have been unfortunate to experience, where employees are given incomplete or deliberately misleading information, and employees who refuse to share with each other are tolerated, even to the detriment of customer service. Sometimes this kind of toxic environment results when there are fears that employees will leave the company with important information. Yet the kinds of employees with a lot of knowledge to share are probably the ones who enjoy learning the most. What kind of environment do you think will keep them happier and healthier? Where are they more likely to stay?

In "Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation", the author believes that the influence of digital technology leads to the development of workers who thrive in a collaborative learning environment. That may be true, but whatever generation they are from, I believe that it's in your best interest to help all of your employees to reach their full potential by providing a fertile and healthy environment for learning in your organization.

Mark Rice and I from Webinar Resources and our partner  Louise Donovan of Discovery LightTM traveled to Philadelphia to promote the Discovery LightTM at the AIIM/On Demand trade show for digital printing and document management. In this picture you can see a copy of the sample Discovery GangTM book in the uv lightbox which was a the table where attendees could learn about Xerox Specialty Imaging. The effect on display in the lightbox is Flourescent Mark, hidden text or images that are viewed with a UV light. The sample book includes examples of three other specialty imaging effects, plus variable data which has been used to personalize the story by incorporating a child's name throughout the book. The books can be printed to order and on demand for a specific child.

To see more photos from AIIM/On Demand, please click here.

For more information about Discovery LightTM, please visit www.discoverylight.com.

Arr! Talking like a pirate is fun, but if Corsairs of the Internet take away your domain name, you will be having anything but fun.

People I know have faced the following scenario - one day you go to your browser to look at your organizations' web site, and it's not there! In its place is the web page of someone else's site, or even more aggravating, that of a domain name squatter.

Domain name squatters are people who look for domains that have expired, hoping to resell them to someone else or back to you for an inflated price, or use them for some other purpose. If this happens to you, you will either have to pay the pirate a ransom to get your domain name back, or get a new domain name for your site. Neither of these options are very attractive. In the first case, you're rewarding unethical behavior which is infuriating not to mention expensive, and in the second case you face having to reprint any collateral that has your web site address on it, go back to square one on any link building you've done for your web site, or possibly even change the name of your company. What a nightmare!

How does this happen? Often it's because the person who has control of the domain name has changed their email address and they didn't get the reminder message from the registrar with the notice that their domain name is due to expire. I think it's a good idea for someone in every organization to stop for a moment and think about whether you know the answers to the following questions:

• Do you know who in your company is in charge of the domain name?
• Does that person have the current username and password to get into the domain name account?
• Do you know what registrar your domain name is currently registered with?
• Is the email address and other contact information on your account current?
• Do you know when your domain name expires?

I recommend you find out and document the answers to those five questions, then take the following actions. If the contact information with the registrar is not current, fix that immediately. If someone in your organization is not the Administrative Contact, correct that as soon as possible. Make note of the expiration date of your domain and put it on your calendars. Then decide how many trustworthy people in your organization should have access to this information, share it with them, and ask them to store it in a safe place. That way, if there is a domain-related emergency with your web site and the person who usually manages your domain is not available, someone else can step in and help.

Some people don't want to deal with all the above details, they prefer to let their web hosting company or an outside web developer handle all domain related issues and put the domain registration fee on the bill with their other services - understandable, but I don't recommend it. If the person you work with at the outside company leaves, there might not be anyone else in the organization who knows the information, and it's often a bit of a hassle to try to get the registrar to give you access to your account. Not that they don't have good reasons to make it difficult - they don't want your domain to get poached by an unauthorized party. Nevertheless, it's one more hassle you don't need. If you are certain of the name of your domain name registrar (I've run into many clients over the years who did not know that information), you will be protected in case domain name pirates send you a fake renewal notice. The expiration date might be real, that is public information, but the company sending the notice might not really be your registrar - they are just trying to trick you into moving your business to their company. Even worse, if you're dealing with an unethical hosting or web development company, they might hold your domain information hostage until you give them something they want that they're not really entitled to. I personally know someone who found herself in just that situation. So please, make sure you're in control of your own domain name. Share the login information with your web developer or hosting company if they need it, and change the password after they're done with their work if that makes you feel better, but always maintain control.

If you have already lost your domain name, what should you do then? I recommend getting a new domain name as similar to the old one as you can, and putting your web site there. Then, see what the expiration date is on your former domain name. When that date arrives, check to see if anyone has renewed it, and if not, grab it. It's possible that if someone was holding your domain name in order to resell it, they were unable to unload it and chose not to renew it. Domain name pirates usually only renew their booty one year at a time - one reason why search engines are said to favor web sites with domain names reserved for longer periods of time. The preceding scenario has happened to someone I know, so it's possible that you could get lucky and get your former domain name back without having to pay bounty to a pirate. That will leave you with two domain names, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You can redirect one to the other, so that no matter which of the two addresses someone uses to get to your site, they can still reach you. Having two domain names to play with is also an advantage when it comes to Search Engine Optimization - so if you're in this position don't get rid of that extra domain name until you've talked to a search engine expert about the SEO possibilities available to you.

Blog Posts: It's not easy to find the time to complete a blog post, and once I've done that, I still have to see if my boss will accept it and post it to our Webinar Resources Blog, powered by Compendium Blogware software. Once I get that far, I feel like I've really accomplished something. Therefore it's very satisfying to potentially increase the audience for that blog post by making it also show up in several other places. By clicking the "Share This" chicklet below each blog post, I can instantly add it to my wall on Facebook. Via an application called Blog Link, the new post automatically appears on my LinkedIn Profile. And by taking our RSS feed link, putting it through FeedBurner, and then using some RSS integration code on my web site, it automatically appears there as well.

I also maintain a WordPress blog that I started for an organization that I belong to, the Route 66 Association of Missouri. I use FeedBurner and RSS integration code with this blog as well to make my posts appear on another one of my web sites. It also appears on my LinkedIn profile with the use of the WordPress LinkedIn Application.

What ways have you found to leverage your valuable content? Please feel free to share your discoveries by leaving a comment.

Power Point Presentations and Webinars: If you've created a PowerPoint presentation, even if the occasion it was created for is over, it can keep on working for you. Some social media sites include an application that allows you to upload a Power Point presentation to your profile page. If you would like to embed your presentation on your web site, Brainshark can accomplish that for you, plus do a lot more: add narration, music or sounds, questions, polls, guestbooks and more. It will even notify you by email when someone has viewed the presentation.

We have clients for whom we provide webinar services that involve inviting people to the webinar, sending reminder notices out to those who registered, recording the webinar and archiving it as a Brainshark Presentation, and sending out follow up emails that invite attendees to view a replay of the presentation. We are currently working on a proposal which involves making the replays available on a web page. The menu for the replays will have some text describing what the webinar is about, adding valuable keywords to the web page to draw visitors through organic search. In addition, the code that embeds the presentation into the web site will contain a "Share This" link which allows viewers to email the presentation to colleagues. Of course we will include a sign-up form in each presentation for viewers who want to receive invitations to future webinars. Now that is what I call getting the most out of your content!

Photos: Are you having an open house or exhibiting at a trade show? Those are opportunities to post some photos and allow your contacts to get to know you better. Social media applications such as Facebook can help you get those photos online quickly and in front of an expanded audience.

I upload some of my photos to Facebook. If I want to link to a specific photo album or image from one of my web sites using ordinary HTML links, this is easy to do because Facebook provides a link you can use that is visible to everyone, not just Facebook members. In addition there are several styles of Facebook badge that you can choose from to embed on your web site. I use one that contains a thumbnail image of the last three photos I uploaded. If one of those images grabs the attention of a visitor to my site, they only have to click on the thumbnail to view the whole album it belongs to. Not all businesses have content that lends itself to taking a lot of photos, but many do, such as entertainment, event marketing, or event management.

Text messages: I set up a Twitter account for myself, and linked it both to my cell phone and my Facebook account. This gave me the ability to send a "Tweet" and update my status on Facebook simultaneously. I can send my text message from the Twitter application online, or, if I'm not near a computer, I can even send it from my cell phone. As an added bonus, with some code supplied by Twitter, my "Tweets" now also show up on one of my web sites. That's a lot of benefit from a very small effort. Would you like to follow me on Twitter?

We all know that almost any marketing strategy we attempt to use in the online world will not be very effective without content. We also know that unfortunately good content is not that easy to come by - it takes time to produce. Time is very valuable, so when I succeed in creating some content, I am anxious to get the most benefit from it that I can. The diagram above shows all the ways I am currently using technology to get the widest audience possible for my output of text messages, photos, PowerPoint presentations, and blog posts. Whether or not you are using any of the same services or applications, I hope you can get some ideas for how to use your content from the following examples.

Being "Green" is trendy. Being "Green" makes you feel like you're doing the right thing. Giving the impression of being "Green" makes you look good to your customers. Appearing to be "Green" is an effective marketing tool for products that, according to one study, are only 1% likely to really be beneficial for the environment. As a business person, you know that in a competitive environment you can't afford to fall for Greenwashing and hype when the time comes to find ways to make your operation more green - it makes sense to be skeptical. On the other hand, when you can find genuinely environmentally friendly practices that have additional benefits for your business, that's a win-win situation.

We've found that one such win-win situation in our work is the use of online forms for collecting information from customers. Using an online form instead of a paper form saves the paper and the resources that went into making it, transporting it, and printing on it. But there are many other benefits to an online form that have nothing to do with saving paper. For example, the data you receive is in a format that you can cut and paste, reducing retyping time and human errors that take time to correct and can cause delays in a project. If your customers are in the habit of leaving out important information on paper forms, you can make those fields required on an online form, and the customer will not be able to send the form without completing it. This not only eliminates the time it would have taken to contact the customer for the necessary information, but also you will be able to turn around projects more quickly, which improves customer service and your profits. Another productivity increase that comes with online forms is the ability to send the data to multiple recipients with one click, saving time that might otherwise be spent gathering the information and making it available to colleagues who need it. With online forms there is an opportunity to upsell or give your customers better service by providing links to information that you want your customers to have, either on the form itself or on a web page where they are directed after completion.

None of the benefits I've mentioned so far are new - online forms have been around for awhile. What is new are some of the added functions that you can add to forms and landing pages with products like email marketing by Exact Target and automated, on demand voice messaging by Vontoo. It is now possible to send a voice message or a text message to a customer's mobile device at their request with forms and other triggered sends. It's possible to show them a personalized image on a landing page that is generated by completing a form or by a click in an email - for an example see this Personalized Landing Pages demonstration - or wow them even more with a rich media Brainshark presentation with customized content that reflects the customer's input from the form.

Please contact us if you would like to deploy any of these exciting new techniques in your customer acquisition program.

It all adds up to: let your "Subscribers Rule" and let your customers communicate with you the way THEY like to communicate with you, which these days is very likely to include Social Media. I am a recent and enthusiastic convert, but I am trying very hard to be careful and not offend anyone with my Social Media experiments. I know what it's like to get unwanted commercial messages, just as you do. For example, I've taken the rather drastic step of having the text messaging function on my cell phone disabled because I resented having to pay to receive spam messages. This past June I saw the rock band Rush in concert for the 15th or 16th time and would have loved to have been able to text message something like "Geddy Lee Rules!" and have it show up on the big screens during intermission (as if people didn't know that already), but that's one of the small pleasures of life I was deprived of when I gave up on text messaging with my phone!

People can get resentful toward you for much less egregious cyber-offenses than that. One reason for the popularity of Social Media is that users feel it's something they can control better than their email inbox, so please keep that in mind when you are thinking about how to use Social Media for business lead generation. If you take the time and learn the technology and the culture by using the media for more casual, personal purposes first, you should get a feel for what is acceptable behavior and what is not, and then get ideas for how it can help with customer acquisition.

If you want to learn more about the kinds of concepts that were discussed at Connections '08, which include the customer acquisition process, personalized marketing campaigns, and effective lead generation, try visiting the Subscribers Rule Blog.