Give free services to non-profit groups for the holidays
December 11, 2006
DM News reports:
That’s an interesting concept - give away B2B services to non-profit groups for the holidays.
Tips for planning a mobile marketing campaign
December 4, 2006
If you’re planning a mobile marketing promotion, take the time to plan carefully. Mobile marketing is still relatively new in the U.S. In contrast to Europe, Americans have not experienced the cool potential of mobile devices (micropayments, bluetooth data downloads, etc.), nor are they as tolerant to the concept of receiving promotional messages delivered to hand held devices (phone, PDA, smartphone).
Based on real experience over multiple projects, I suggest the following:
- Get multiple project bids from mobile promotion providers and scrutinize the differences carefully.
- Decide whether a vanity short code is worth the extra cost, or will a random short code suffice? Vanity codes typically cost twice as much per month to rent. You can use either the numbers or the letter equivalents. Examples of useful vanity codes:
- Tie the vanity short code to an event date:“Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with us. Text FUN to 50505 for details.” (50505 = May 5th, 2005)
- Tie the vanity short code to a related topic:“Try Brand X Contact Lenses. Text TRY to MYEYE for free trial details.
- Short codes can be 5 or 6 letters or numbers long. You can lookup available short codes yourself. Or ask your provider if they maintain a portfolio of easy to remember short codes (e.g. “212121″) they’ve reserved for use.
- Test whatever you can. If you have consumers text a keyword to a short code, set up different keywords to appear in promotional messaging. For example:
- For TV spot: text TRY to 12345 to get your free trial of brand X.
- For print ad: text GET to 12345 to get your free trial of brand X.
- For outdoor: text GO to 12345 to get your free trial of brand X.
- Decide whether you will pay all the transmission charges (Mobile Originating “MO” and Mobile Terminated “MT”) or will the consumer possibly be charged? Clearly communicate that in your offer.
- Confirm that your promotion will work through all the major carriers. Some carriers might not permit downloads (e.g. ringtones, wallpapers) over their proprietary networks.
- Make sure you understand the reporting data you’ll get from the mobile provider.
- What specifically will the mobile provider give you access to?
- Is the data real-time?
- What data wont you get?
- What exactly does geographic reporting data represent? (The phone number’s area code is not useful considering that someone with a New York area code might have moved to Florida and kept the number.)
- If you are driving to a Web site for offer registration, consider the following:
- Be clear about whether you intend to contact consumers again via SMS to set their expectations. Get their opt-in consent for future contact.
- Make sure you have sufficient lead time. Promotions and offer details often need to be complete and submitted to various carriers for their formal review and approval. Allow time for that and a buffer in case you need to make some significant last minute change.
- Make sure opt-out messaging, process and policy are in place and reviewed by your legal counsel before a campaign begins.
- Find out what phone/carriers your clients use so you can make sure they will all work. Maybe collect them now under the impression that you are building a small group of exclusive testers prior to consumer launch.
The Mobile Marketing Association publishes best practices and conduct guidelines you should read. They have periodic Webinar on various topics and often showcase examples of work being done beyond ringtone and wallpaper downloads.
I hope you found this useful.
Good luck!
-Roland
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
Footnote symbol order
November 27, 2006
I received a reward program credit card application from Fidelity Investments over the weekend. As with any such application, reading the footnotes is critical to understanding just what is included in the marketing promises. I also spent many years working on such acquisition applications, so I have a morbid curiosity to read these boring things (or I’m just a glutton for punishment).
All the obscure use of footnotes in this one just made my head hurt. Six-panel brochures are hard to navigate as is, but the writer/reviewers did a poor job footnoting the details. There was no consistency or recognizable pattern. For example, the first inside panel cites in the following order: §§, **, *, †. I don’t know what reference manual they used. More likely, it was a marketing intern or other inexperienced, young professional.
Chicago Manual used to be the gold standard, but is more and more ignored either because of lack of experience or because software application programmers set up defaults that didn’t follow a proper guide.
Here’s the generally accepted order to follow:
| 1 | asterisk | * |
| 2 | dagger | † |
| 3 | double dagger | ‡ |
| 4 | section symbol | § |
| 5 | parallel lines | || |
| 6 | paragraph | ¶ |
| 7 | number sign | # |
| restart using doubles | ||
| 8 | two asterisks | ** |
| 9 | two daggers | †† |
| 10 | two double daggers | ‡‡ |
| etc. |
Many, myself included, are tempted to follow a eye-pleasing *, **, †, ††, but it’s not correct. Just resist temptation and follow the correct format. While your at it, be sure to correct others as well. Standards and consistency are important.
Hope you find this helpful.
-Roland
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
Handy domain name research and suggestion tools
November 19, 2006
I have previously written about how to choose domain names to register.
Pretty much any domain name registrar Web site has a recommendation tool. I want to highlight two research tools I really like:
PC Names Domain Search — “A free site dedicated to developing the most advanced tools for finding domains”
PC Names has a clean interface and uses AJAX to display available domain names in real time as you type. You can search on available dictionary words, 3 letter domains, 4 letter domains. You can also allow it to recommend alternate keywords (a thesaurus-like function).
ABAKUS KeywordDomain — “Save time finding that ideal keyword rich domain name”
Abakus allows the user to enter up to four keywords for various Top Level Domains (TLDs), then generate domain name suggestions.
Both allow WhoIs lookups without annoying challenge mechanisms that require you to type in text from a randomly displayed image.
Definitely check out these domain name tools the next time you are brainstorming domain names. They can save you a lot of time and aggravation.
I hope you find these useful.
-Roland
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
Tips to stop blog comment spam on WordPress blogs
November 17, 2006
I enjoy publishing my blogs using WordPress. A few short months after switching to WordPress from Blogger, I began to get a steady trickle of comment spam. Just plain garbage not related to any of my articles. These comments contain URLs for porn, prescription medication, online casinos, loan providers, insurance providers and more. Some just have random characters and a URL, while others might have eight rows of URLs.
Still others include fake compliments in broken English, such as “Great site. I like you say. Go pornpalace123.xhfshds.com.”
I get annoyed and frustrated because I would like legitimate reader feedback and I don’t want to turn off real visitors who see these junk links. So my writing hobby also requires constant vigilance.
Also, this nonsense messes with my traffic stats. I want to have reliable numbers, not artificially inflated with spammer visits.
What’s most bizarre is that the guys/gals posting this crap don’t know that comment spam is no longer effective in improving their Web site’s natural search results, because it’s typically not relevant and the no-follow tag tells the major search engines not to index hyperlinks in comments. These spammers are not following current Search Engine Optimization methodology and tactics. I guess they didn’t get the memo at the last Spammer-con.
Tips for WordPress blog publishers:
- Regularly update the Comment Moderation filter with keywords you want to screen for and temporarily hold in a queue for your review.
- Regularly update the Comment Blacklist filter — extreme foul language or comment spam subjects like casino, prescription names, sex acts, etc.
- Temporarily block IP address ranges that repeatedly post spam over time. (Warning! Only advanced users should consider this extreme tactic.)
- Install a plug-in that challenges the comment poster to either answer a math problem or type in the text displayed in an image. That helps slow down automated spambots.
- Activate Akismet plug-in to move possible comment spam into a queue for your review.
- Install and activate Bad Behavior plug-in to block known spammers from accessing your blog.
I regularly update the built-in WordPress Comment Moderation filter (”Options > Discussion”) with various keywords and domain names to help flag comment spam and put it in a review queue.
While I’m doing that, I also update the Comment Blacklist with every dirty word and spelling/misspelling variation I find in comment spam.
At times I’d turn off the comments function for a few days to see if I could make the spammers give up and move on. But after I turned the function on again, the spam returned quickly. Presumably automated spam bots are the cause.
I tried implementing a challenge mechanism that requires the comment poster to type in the letters/numbers displayed in a unique image. But that didn’t have much affect and broke unexpectedly a few times.
I activated the WordPress Akismet plug-in about 3 months ago. Since then, Askimet has caught 977 and 351 spam posts on Chaos365.com and NewMediaSandbox.com, respectively. It automatically puts comments in it’s own queue (”Manage > Akismet Spam”) and I review to confirm there are no legitimate reader posts. What’s nice about this tool is that it draws from a library of data to help flag possible spam posts. Then when I submit what I consider to be spam, it combines with other user-provided data so all users benefit.
Akismet has caught 977 spam for you since you first installed it.
You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. :)
Suddenly, the first week of November I got several hundred spam messages in my Akismet queue in less than a weeks time. I decided it was time to find a tool to block spammers before they could even post.
I’ve carefully used the Comment Blacklist to restrict specific IP address ranges that repeatedly abuse my blog. I’ve even updated .htaccess file a few times. But realizing that IP addresses may change, I edit these only temporarily as a short-term solution to try to make spammers/spam bots move on.
Obviously, this is becoming to much work. I needed an automated solution. The plug-in I found is called Bad Behavior. It essentially prevents identified spammers from accessing the blog. Period.
I installed Bad Behavior on a Sunday morning on my two primary blogs. By Friday morning (5 days later), it reported that it had blocked 2,381 access attempts on Chaos365.com and 198 access attempts on NewMediaSandbox.com. I can check (”Options > Bad Behavior”) to see how many attempts are reported for the past 7 days.
In the same period since installing Bad Behavior, each day I also checked the Akismet plug-in to see if anything is in my queue awaiting confirmation and I am happy to report it has been zero each day for both blogs.
There are other popular WordPress plug-in solutions, such as Spam Karma, that work well for many bloggers. But your best strategy to get started should be trial and tweak, and add on additional tactics carefully. Research these solutions I’ve mentioned (Akismet, Bad Behavior, Spam Karma), check out other options available at WordPress.org, and decide what may be right for you. Just don’t activate too many simultaneously because you might create unexpected conflicts that could prevent legitimate visitors from accessing or contributing to your Web site.
In summary, WordPress owners should:
- Carefully identify keywords not related to your blog content that you want to moderate or block altogether.
- Install and activate the latest Akismet and Bad Behavior plug-ins.
- Fine tune as necessary so you keep the good posts in and the garbage out.
- Keep publishing!
I hope you find this useful.
Good luck!
-Roland
Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.
©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.
