Posts tagged Planning
PPC Planning Matrix
Jan 13th
One of the opportunities we have as Paid Search Marketing professionals is to help business people communicate their marketing ideas without burdening them with the details of Paid Search. A few months back, I came across a tool that helped tremendously. We adopted it in-house, and tested it with a…
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B2B SEO 2012 Strategy Planning: 4 Recommendations
Dec 9th
In early November, Webmarketing123 released their first state of digital marketing report. The report surveyed more than 500 B2B and B2C marketing professionals, with roughly a 66-34 percent split, respectively. The report takes an in-depth look a…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
B2B SEO 2012 Strategy Planning: 4 Recommendations – Search Engine Watch
Dec 9th
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B2B SEO 2012 Strategy Planning: 4 Recommendations
Search Engine Watch The report takes an in-depth look at digital marketing focus, impact of SEO, PPC, and social media programs, and where marketing managers are focusing budget in 2012. 57 percent of B2Bs say SEO makes the biggest impact on their lead generation … |
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Groupon Planning IPO in Early November
Oct 25th
Groupon has announced plans to go public the first week in November. Although the Chicago-based deal giant had initially expected the IPO to be based on a $20 to $25 billion valuation, the projected valuation is now much lower.
Groupon is planning to sell 30 million shares, which represent less than five percent of the company, at a price point of $16 to $18 per share. The IPO is expected to raise approximately $478.8 million and implies a value of $10.1 billion to $11.4 billion. Even though the implied value will be drastically lower than initially planned, it is significantly higher than the $6 billion Google offered for Groupon late last year.
Since June 30th of 2009, Groupon has grown from 152,203 subscribers to over 142.9 million subscribers. Although the growth rate and number of subscribers are impressive, only 29.5 million subscribers have ever purchased a single Groupon and only 16 million have purchased more than one Groupon.
Andrew Mason, Groupon’s CEO and co-founder, stated the following in a recent letter to potential investors:
“We have yet to reach sustained profitability and we have no shortage of competition. Our path will include some moments of brilliance and others of sheer stupidity. Knowing that this will at times be a bumpy ride, we thank you for considering joining us.”
In addition to the high competition present in the industry, Groupon has had problems including: non-standard accounting, class-action lawsuits, dissatisfied merchants, bad publicity, and high-level staffers exiting the company at inopportune times.
Morningstar Analyst Rick Summer advised his readers to stay away from the Groupon IPO due to deal fatigue, decreasing effectiveness for merchants running local deals, lack of scalability, and the business not being protected adequately from competitors. In addition, Summer stated that he believes the price point of the stock should be approximately $8 per share and an enterprise value of around $5 billion.
Groupon, which will use the ticker symbol GRPN, is planning to use the proceeds from the IPO for working capital, product development, and acquisitions.
[Sources Include: Forbes & CIO Today]
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Three Steps To SEM Planning Success
Oct 24th
Ahh, annual planning season. Nothing quite like it. You can almost smell it in the air. Dozens of spreadsheets packed with endless assumptions, each one more fantastic than the last, combining to ultimately seal a marketer’s fate for the next 12 months. What could be better than that? Well, how…
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5 Considerations In Planning Your Small Business 2012 Ad Budget
Oct 17th
Last month, I had the opportunity to join nearly 400 leaders from major local search companies for the BIA/Kelsey DMS ‘11 conference in Denver.
The annual industry event, which this year included speakers and panelists from the likes of AT&T Interactive, Eniro, Facebook, Local Matters,…
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ReadyTalk Adds Conference Planning, Meetings to Salesforce
Aug 30th
If you’ve seen the ReadyTalk conferencing platform at work, you know it has one key feature that distinguishes it quite well over certain conferencing competitors: It can run entirely in Flash. That means it’s not bound to Java, and up to now, it’s meant that ReadyTalk runs well with minority browsers such as Apple Safari for Windows, and Opera.
What it means today, though, is something quite different and a sign of the new times we live in: A new version of ReadyTalk for Salesforce, released this morning at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, embeds both conference ability and meeting coordination not into a Web browser, but instead into the fast-growing, cloud-based CRM platform.
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The Salesforce app is the first to use the ReadyTalk API, released last month, to come directly from ReadyTalk itself. The platform was designed to give developers direct access to the stages and steps involved in crafting a conferencing workflow, including generating the invitations, accepting registrations, automating reminders to participants, and distributing post-event surveys. All of these stages have been implemented in the Salesforce rendition, so that users can conduct conferencing workflows with Salesforce contacts.
Anita Wehnert, who directs product marketing for ReadyTalk, gave RWW a complete demonstration. “The whole goal with this application,” she tells us, “is to make things easier for people doing scheduling of meetings or webinars or online training sessions or sales demos. We automate getting that data into Salesforce versus having it locked into a conferencing system.”
The initial screen, shown here, reveals a very Salesforce-friendly environment with a ReadyTalk tab added to the usual mix of Chatter, Leads, Contacts, and Campaigns. Here, a user can see the ongoing status of meetings already scheduled, by both the user and others throughout the organization.
The Conference Center screen (familiar to anyone who’s used the standard ReadyTalk UI) is where a new meeting is scheduled. It’s actually a view of the continually updated Conference Center Web app, within what Web app developers call an IFRAME element. All the other elements of this app, Wehnert tells us, were implemented in Force.com. You may add any number or sequence of fields to the registration form. After that’s set up, you then import the meeting into Salesforce using the controls in the Meetings tab.
Once imported, all the information may be shared explicitly with others within the organization – for instance, they may see whom you’ve invited and whether they’ve responded, if you so desire. It’s important to note here that the meeting creation data is registered and entered into ReadyTalk’s database first, and then the Salesforce app uses the ReadyTalk API to import the data and populate the Salesforce database.
“The Salesforce application is going to sync with our database once per hour,” notes Wehnert, “or every time I click on that Sync with ReadyTalk button.” Individuals are invited to a meeting from within ReadyTalk, and they can be sourced from the Salesforce database. When that happens, those invitees are then synced with ReadyTalk, again by way of the API. Invitees who happen to be using Salesforce will see a form like the figure below.
The various activities triggered by the application are tracked through Salesforce Chatter, its built-in messaging service. Any Salesforce user will be familiar with the output, which looks a bit like one’s Twitter page:
Licensing this software will be a fully automatic deal. “We offer the ReadyTalk for Salesforce AppExchange application as a value-add to our customers,” remarks Wehnert, “so any of our customers are free to use it. There’s no charge for downloading the application and installing it from AppExchange, and there’s no additional fee for the software. ReadyTalk offers its conferencing service in tiers, with the fee per minute starting at 20¢, and an option to pay a flat fee of $49 per month for up to 25 participants, or $99 per month for up to 3,000.
“Salesforce has a well-documented API; we worked with a third party to develop the integration,” Wehnert tells RWW. “We’ve been working over the last two years to make sure we got it right, but we think it’s great that Salesforce can help companies like ReadyTalk to build AppExchange applications.”
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How to Think Like an Art Thief When Planning Your Next Social Media Campaign
Aug 17th
There are lots of suggestions on improving your social media campaigns out on the Interwebs, but this post from Jesse Stanchak caught my attention. He describes how to plan a campaign like an art thief.. Now Stanchak isn’t advocating actual larceny here, but his suggestions are good ones and worth repeating.
He says, “a lot of the potential of social media is tied up in being willing to think big and then plan small, just like an art thief.”
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Here are his tips, and no, they don’t include avoiding the law:
- Dream big or don’t bother. Nobody ever steals paintings of dogs playing poker, or the velvet Elvis genre. Unless you’re willing to actually put in the work to create something of value for your audience, they’re just going to ignore you.
- Know what people like. Art thieves don’t just steal works by artists they personally appreciate; they target artists whose work will sell. Don’t know your audience? Then step back and do some research and get a better understanding. When was the last time you looked at your server and chat logs, for example?
- Remember that simple plans are best. Look at your social media presence. Is it more complicated than it needs to be? How many moving parts does it have, and what can be eliminated?
- Sweat the details. Don’t mistake simple for easy. The little things don’t seem very sexy, but when a social media campaign goes off the rails, it’s usually because someone got careless and sent a tweet from the wrong account, or something just as trivial. Find someone who is Type A enough to care about the details.
- Recognize you can’t control everything. There is no such thing as a perfect plan. Putting a plan in motion means involving other people and these other people can be unpredictable. Keep this in mind and make plans for dealing with the unexpected.
- Think about the day after. Law enforcement officials say that most art thieves get caught not while stealing their prizes, but when trying to sell them later. Similarly, too many social media campaigns focus on attracting a ton of fans and followers without any consideration being given to what the brand will do with these relationships once they’re formed. Those of you who have quickly gained followers know that you can quickly lose them too.
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