Jon Samsel

Each morning I start my day reviewing the brands I monitor on a regular basis. I won’t tell you which brands I monitor but I will tell you that I use five tools to monitor them so that I can make the most of my day as a busy online marketer:

1. Google Reader
2. Social Mention Alerts / Google Alerts
3. Google News
4. Twitter
5. Heardable

Were you surprised that my list didn’t contain any of the popular social media monitoring tools such as Radian6, eCairn, Sysomos or Techrigy SM2? There is nothing wrong with utilizing any of these tools as long as you are willing to put the time and effort into learning how to use them. By doing so, you can probably automate 80% of your online brand research effort that is required when trying to monitor a brand.

Frankly, that’s what we have staff for — to be experts at utilizing these types of robust tools. But as a busy executive, I often don’t have the time not patience to learn yet another cool tool to help me do my job. Call me old school, by I am perfectly happy using a handful of simple, smart, user-friendly tools that give me the information that I need, when I need it (without much hassle). My five tools fit the bill quite nicely — and I marry my findings with those on my expert teams to compile a holistic view on brand performance.

Why do I monitor certain brands? It’s my job to measure, monitor and improve brand effectiveness because in the business world I live and breath in– winning is everything. Big companies don’t pay the money they do to come in second place. Management wants to achieve all of its goals. Employees want to advance their careers. Shareholders want to see a fair return on their investment.

Business is a full-contact sport. It’s about beating your competitors before they beat you.

When I am knee-deep in the data, what am I looking for? What jewels am I unearthing? What actionable takeaways to I gain from the work that I do? Glad you asked!

My Tools Help Me

• Understand what communities are buzzing about
• Identify key trends
• Perform competitive analysis
• Optimize brand performance
• Improve the customer experience
• Grow market share / Boost sales

Using The Tools In My E-Toolbox

Let me explain how I utilize each to start by day as a busy online marketer.

Google Reader:  This is what I use to aggregate all my RSS feeds into one comprehensive list that I can scan in less than a minute to see if there are any articles or blog posts from those I trust that I should be aware of. When I find something I want to read, I mark it so I can read the post later in the day over lunch.

By scanning the headlines I collect in Google Reader, I get a feel for what’s being discussed on a deeper level in the blogosphere, and provides the ‘expert’ POV on what communities are buzzing about.

Social Mention Alerts / Google Alerts:  I lump these two together because they essentially do the same thing, but I find neither one is strong enough on it’s own for me to forgo using the other. Basically, I use these tools to seek out and flag certain keywords on a daily basis and serve them up to me in a consolidated list I can quickly scan. Google is fairly comprehensive on its own, but I distrust using a single keyword monitoring service to sift through the entire deep web of data on a daily basis. I like SocialMention.com’s alerts because they tend to provide me with a wider variety of results.

To be honest, there is a lot of dreg one has to comb through to find the gold, but you would be surprised to learn that I find all kinds of quirky, useful and unexpected nuggets of data in these simple, automated data feeds. Set up your keywords one time, then check you email for daily results. Easy as pie.

Google News:  To me, Google News is the one and only daily news aggregator I need to tap into. Sure, I occasionally monitor PRWeb and BusinessWire, or go to Alltop or TMZ (for entertainment), but for news (eg: press releases and breaking stories) Google News has replaced my daily newspaper and my online portals.

I search for certain brand keywords and can sort through countless stories that inform me about strategy, website redesigns, staff changes, and the like.

Twitter:  For real-time breaking information, nothing beats Twitter. It really has become my social search engine of choice. Not because it functions so much as a search engine but as a pulse of what’s happening. I can easily see what’s trending hot right now and I can perform a little bit of competitive analysis by studying how savvy certain brands are by looking to see if they are on Twitter (many still are not, and when they are, you cannot find them because often times their brand name has been hyjacked by someone else). You can also watch how certain brands are participating on Twitter (so many pilot tests, so little authenticity — such as having one’s CEO actively tweeting).

Heardable:  I’ve been a fan of Heardable.com since I was first invited to test their beta site in late 2009. It is quite simply one of the most underrated digital marketing gems out there (although this will be changing fast as their first press release came out today).

So what is the Heardable platform and how do I use it?  Heardable allows anyone to type in a domain name and within seconds, get a comprehensive assessment of that brand’s online effectiveness in six critical areas. I have a free account with Heardable which allows me to scan multiple brands at the same time, store groups of scans that I may need to revisit daily, track how multiple brands perform against each other over time, and determine what specifically one brand is doing to score higher than another.

I love to ‘look under the hood’ at the top brands in the world that are profiled in The Heardable 100 list of companies. At a glance, you can see common threads of what leading brands are doing better than everyone else, such as:

• Who is optimizing their website for mobile browsers — and which browsers?
• What analytic tools are certain brands using?
• Which brands are excelling at SEO and which are not?
• Is brand x sociable and/or sharing data — living up to the spirit of the giving web, the foundation of which all of web 2.0 and now web 3.0 is based on?

Heardable is brilliant. And from what I hear from the company’s founders, their growth strategy is very exciting. Keep an eye on Heardable.

In summary, I perform my daily ritual not because I yearn to to better than I did the day before. It’s my job to help brands win by increasing sales and growing market share. This can only be done of you know what’s happening in your market, you’re being the best steward of your brand as possible, you’re learning though trial and error and testing, you’re listening to crowds and trying your best to please, and you are optimizing everything you do as often as possible — from landing pages to the language you use to talk about your brand to the way you engage your constituents.

Online brand optimization ain’t easy. But with the right (free) tools and a little hard work come great rewards.

So you need to create, design or develop a landing page that converts  visits into sales–where do you begin?

First, let’s define what a landing page is. Typically, a landing page is a web page that supports an online marketing campaign and is designed to capture leads or convert visitors into sales. Often, landing pages are separate and distinct from a main website, have unique website addresses, and allow for end-to-end campaign tracking (via unique phone numbers and/or source code tracking appended to the URL).

Typical landing page elements are:

1. Header masthead (logo, tagline, phone number)
2. Hero shot (a graphic representation of the benefit of the product or service you are selling)
3. Headline text and supporting text
4. An offer (50% off your first order, free shipping)
5. A time ticker (limited time offer with an expiration date) to create a sense of urgency
6. Calls to action (call now with a phone number, fill out this form with a form on the page, engage in live chat with a link to start a chat session)
7. Direct response elements (red arrow that directs the eye to a specific action, yellow highlighter effect that draws the eye to an offer of benefit, big bold 1-800 number, etc)
8. Customer testimonials or product reviews (to build trust and re-enforce visitor’s purchase decision)
9. Trust marks such as BBB, McAfee or VeriSign
10. Product or service comparisons

Studying your competitor’s landing pages may seem like a logical place to start, but keep in mind that other companies may have created their landing pages with entirely different goals in mind. This may not be a simple apples to apples comparison, as your goals may be different than those of competing firms. It can’t hurt to know what your competitors are doing, just don’t copy them.

Additionally, competitive landing pages you identify may not be performing very well. The visit-to-lead ratios, for example, on company Y’s landing page may be 2%, far below your target goal of 7%, so copying what others are doing in not always the smartest move.

When you are ready to start a new landing page design and development process, I recommend you start by identifying of few important elements having to do with your goals and objectives.

10 step landing page development process:

1. Identify the baseline visit-to-lead ratio you are trying to beat (ie: 3%)
2. Spell out the desired mix of lead transaction type you want (ie: 70% phone, 30% form)
3. Name the optimal product mix (ie: 50% premium brand dogfood, 30% animal toys, 20% grooming products)
4. Recognize your desired customer mix (ie: 90% repeat/existing customers, 10% once-and-gone customers)
5. List the source of the traffic to your landing page (ie: paid search, banner ads, etc)
6. Identify the time of year this landing page will be used (to gauge whether or not this could/should impact the design)
7. Name your color choices such as background, accent, fonts, images, etc (evaluate brand must-have colors vs. those colors that we know stimulate user response online and consider new combinations)
8. Form placement: Place the entire form on the page vs. a multi-part form vs. a form that is one click away (any combination of which can radically impact results)
9. Smart forms & on-site help: Certain form elements, for example, are known to impact conversions
10. Think of additional ancillary elements you may need, such as live chat, audio, flash animation, video, calculators, click to call, collapsible design elements using AJAX or the like–which are all elements that can impact landing page performance

Once each of these steps is performed, design several new landing pages, varying the tone, style and layout. Then test your new pages. Only testing with a live audience will reveal the winning landing page design. Online visitors are a funny breed. Often, the ‘best’ design perform poorly and ‘ugly’ designs yield great results. From a brand perspective, try to find a landing page that you are proud to display to the world, yet one that fulfills your sales goals.

I encourage you to consider a wildcard design now and again that breaks all the rules. This is one way to radically out-perform, or lose to your control landing page. But breakthrough landing page designs often come about by trying something different. Good luck and happy testing!

Twitter is often described as a free micro-blogging and social networking service that you can use to send quick text messages or ‘tweets’ to friends and followers, no more than 140 characters long. While this may be a factually correct description, it only scratches the surface of how Twitter is being utilized as a revolutionary communications platform.

Since Twitter is hardware agnostic, you can access Twitter using hundreds of different devices. This flexibility is just one of the reasons the use of Twitter is spreading so fast. Anytime, anywhere accessibility means that users can tweet from anywhere–and they are! From the front lines of war zones, to sporting events, family vacations, the local conference event–anywhere you can see or do you can tweet about.

Recently a colleague of mine asked me about Twitter. He heard I was using it to conduct research, promote my blog, and provide assistance to others. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would anyone use Twitter? Especially a Fortune 100 company? I just don’t see how it’s useful or effective.”

I could relate to her. You see, I felt the same way only a month or so ago when I first joined Twitter. I posted a few comments, followed a few people, conducted a couple of advanced searches on topics of interest. Yawn. You mean to tell me people are tweeting about taking their children to soccer practice? Tweeting about what they are eating? Posting on topics such as gastronomical pains? Here are three sample tweets (actual Twitter posts):

• I ate donuts all weekend
• last day of skiing. I went crazy and shredded some mogul
• Lunch with the new employee. I’m officially The Man now

Why on earth would I spend my valuable time sorting through thousands of comments like these concerning the mundane happenings of so many ordinary lives?

Then I started noticing other tweets like these:

• FREE widget creation tool. http://tinyurl.com/8jplw4
• New report shows Flash is poor choice for navigation design: http://tinyurl.com/7bp2je PS: Real world testing shows search engines can’t see the keyword buckets
• Nice viral marketing campaign. Click through the site till you see the surprise ending! http://tinyurl.com/3bp1ju

Hmmm. Links to resources, collaborative research findings, online marketing case studies. I searched deeper and found tweets like these:

• Wholefoods So far, we have not identified any products that contain the implicated peanut butter. We will post more details in The Whole Story shortly
• LanceArmstrong Kicked off the LS Global Campaign today at Royal Adelaide Hospital with Premier Rann, Federal Treasurer Swann and many others. Here we go
• DellOutlet Coupons coming for select Dell Outlet laptops & desktops! Not combinable w/ other coupons. Online only. Limit 2 PCs/customer. Expire 1/19/ 09
• Zappos CES attendees: Intel party. For non-VIP entry say passwd “goat” at door
• JetBlue Winter weather in the Northeast may cause delays or cancellations. Check your flight’s status at http://www.jetblue.com/flig…

Wow! Official tweets from companies, celebrities, CEO’s and even politicians. Tweets on a wide range of topics such as crisis management, news & event coverage, product discounts, networking opportunities, and even proactive customer service! With my online marketing noggin now fully engaged, I started thinking about Twitter as a strategy for a businesses or individuals looking to build their brand, increase sales, and/or create awareness. The possibilities are endless (and exciting).

As an outreach strategy, I identified eight obvious areas of focus that any person or organization could capitalize on by using Twitter:

1. Sales & marketing
2. Reputation management
3. Social advocacy
4. Crisis management
5. Customer care / help
6. News & event coverage
7. Networking / employment
8. Research & development

And how to utilize Twitter in each of the above eight areas? Here are four simple ways to engage with the Twitter.com site:

1. Search - Use Twitter to find people, topics of interest, companies to follow, etc.
2. Follow - Use Twitter to track all those you deem worthy of following (anytime they post, it’s added to your Twitter home page
3. Post - Try contributing content (give advice, insights, tips, special offers, research links, event coverage, rebuttal to negative news, etc.) by either posting one tweet at a time, or better yet, tie in your blog posts and your other online contributions to Twitter automatically using FriendFeed or any number of feed services available online
4. Interact - Customize the design of your Twitter profile, send direct messages to people and form new relationships, interact with the official Twitter blog, connect all your devices (like your Blackberry, iPhone, etc), and more!

So what are you waiting for? The best way to see for yourself how Twitter can ‘benetweet’ your company, website, blog, product or service is to dive right in and start tweeting today.

Lester Wunderman, the so-called father of direct marketing, once said that “advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship.” In his book Being Direct, he also says that direct marketing is both an art and science that communicates directly with an individual to change behavior and not just an attitude to gain a measurable response.

Direct marketing is any direct communication directed at targeted individuals or demographic where a response is asked for and expected. A response can take many forms– a phone call, a direct order, a sales lead, or traffic to a website—but in DR, a response usulally refers to the results of your campaign.

Direct Response Television (commonly referred to as DRTV) is a sub-channel of direct response marketing utilizing short form TV commercials (spots less than two minutes in length) and longer form infomercials that compel consumers into action through use of an 800 number to get direct responses to the advertiser.

Launching compelling and effective DRTV campaigns may seem easy, but as Wunderman said, it’s a little bit art and science. The key to effective DRTV is presenting a clear, concise and compelling sales presentation. The more time your have to present and sell, the more likely you are to generate responses.

The ‘art’ portion of DRTV is made up of the fun, creative aspects of shooting and presenting the spots themselves. The spokesperson you hire, the script you write, the focus group you test with, the offer presented, the live audience you coral, and the creativity of your on-screen graphics or the set you build to film in—are all critical pieces of the creative puzzle.

But the science part of DRTV success is just as important.

15 Primary Levers for Optimizing DRTV Campaigns:

1. Media planning & buying process
2. Communication & planning
3. Testing methodology / testing process
4. Audience profiling / geo-targeting
5. Integrated multi-channel campaigns
6. Day-to-day media buying and how media buyers are compensated
7. Amount of media spend / duration of campaign
8. Spot style & format
9. Final commercial or informercial / creative variations of each spot
10. The demonstration
11. Message / offer
12. Talent (spokesperson, voice over, audience, etc)
13. Supporting microsite to continue the offline conversation online / boost responses
14. Reporting, day-parting, analytics / optimizing cost to response to sales ratio
15. Performance and compensation of sales staff responding to DRTV responses

It’s been said that the key to sales success is learning how to budget your time. But the term “time-management” seems to create a false impression of what a person is able to do. Time-management is actually self-management. Time can’t be managed. Time is uncontrollable; we can only manage ourselves, and our use of time.

It’s interesting that the skills we need to manage others are the same skills that we need to manage ourselves: the ability to plan, delegate, organize, direct and control. Part of this includes being able to recognize what wastes your time.

Here is a list of common time-wasters:

1. Shifting priorities and crisis management
2. Lack of priorities/objectives
3. Procrastination
4. Too much clutter
5. Attempting too much

Ideas for Effective Self Management

1. Define your objectives as clearly as possible. Do you find you are not doing what you want because your goals have not been set? One attribute of successful people is their ability to work out what they want to achieve using written goals, which they review constantly. Your long term goals should impact your daily activities and be included on your “to do” list. Without a goal or objective people tend to just drift personally and professionally
2. Analyze your use of time. Are you spending enough time on the important things? If you are constantly asking yourself “What is the most important use of my time, right now?” it will help you to focus on ‘important tasks’ and stop reacting to tasks which seem urgent (or pleasant to do) but carry no importance towards your goals.
3. Have a plan. How can you achieve your goals without a plan? Most people know what they want but have no plan to achieve it except through hard work. Your monthly plan should be reviewed daily and reset as your achievements are met. Successful people make lists constantly. It enables them to stay on top of priorities and enable them to remain flexible to changing priorities. This should be done for both personal and business goals. The value of a good plan is to identify trouble spots early and seek out solutions. “I don’t let a single day go by without knowing why I didn’t capture a sale. Be sure to measure the progress you make toward your goals because what you can measure you can control.

Self-management is not a hard subject to understand, but unless you are committed to integrating time-management techniques into your daily routine you’ll only achieve partial results. The lesson to learn is that the more time we spend planning our time and activities the more time we will have for those activities.

In today’s busy book publishing world, neither agents nor imprints have the time, energy or patience to review the hundreds of query letters and manuscripts that flood their offices. Book publishing is big business—and to that end, writers must approach their craft as such.

A book proposal serve as both a creative and business outline that ’sells’ both the author and project. A proposal convinces the publisher that this is a topic that consumers want to read, that a book is the right format for this topic, and that you are the right person for the task.

Typically, a non-fiction book proposal is a little more focused on the business aspects of the book, such as book competitors (similar titles on the market), marketing of the book (what you are prepared to do to help sell sale books), and publicity (are you the type of author that can generate press and interest to get the word out there once the title is published). A fiction book proposal is more about convincing agents and editors that you are good writer, so fiction proposals contain sample chapters—and links to your previous novels (assuming you have any).

A stellar book proposal can land you a well-earned book contract with a cash advance before you even start writing one word of your final tome. It is incumbent upon you, the writer, to provide editors and agents with insights and answers to the following questions:

1. Cover Sheet
2. Introduction of Book Concept
3. About the Author
4. Market Demographics
5. Competitive Books
6. Marketing, Author Promotion and Publicity
7. Overview, Purpose & Description of the Book
8. Table of Contents
9. Sample Chapter
10. Book Timetable

Sample Non-Fiction Book Proposal:

>> Dead Ahead: 1999 (pdf)