Archive: March 2010

Snow, sleet, rain, and hail…your mail gets delivered through it all (at discounted postal rates)—if you have the right address information. When building your mail list, we look at these three factors:

1. Does the address really exist?

2. Does the person it’s addressed to live there?

3. What’s the absolute minimum amount of postage necessary?

We flag addresses that don’t have a ZIP4 as well as addresses thought to be multifamily dwellings but missing an apartment or suite number. Then we compare those addresses to our direct mail response database and fill in the blanks. This isn’t a generic resident list or aggregated list of self-reported addresses. It’s a record of confirmed mail order buyers who have a proven propensity to respond to direct mail offers. Results vary from list to list, but on average we’re able to enhance between 15% and 20% of the records that would otherwise not receive a ZIP4, improving deliverability and giving us the ability to gather change of address information.

To put this technology to work for you. Email business@solutionset.com and ask about I-Quality. We’re happy to help.

A project manager is a combination client manager, strategist, team lead, qa lead, and more–and plays an integral role in the successful delivery of digital projects. An earlier blog post, The Art of Project Management, explored the role of the project manager in a digital environment and what it takes to be a project manager. 

Many great tools exist to support those who want to learn the trade, including courses and certification through the Project Management Institute, software, seminars, workshops, and books. Each of these tools helps supply project managers with a solid foundation with which to perfect their craft. At SolutionSet, we recommend reading three books which complement these tools and are designed to help with the mindset of a project manager and to teach them how to think. Our recommended reading includes:

The Art of War

Sun Tzu’s classic dissertation on warfare is not solely about the craft of war. It also has many lessons to teach us about managing situations and conflicts. 

Each chapter is dedicated to specific lessons about conflicts from strategy and planning, through initiative, reaction and resolution. These lessons serve to provide a context for approaching a situation and provide a valuable point-of-view for reflection. Not every lesson translates and is applicable, but many are:

 “Those who are first on the battlefield and await the opponents are at ease; those who are last on the battlefield and head into battle get worn out.”

This lesson is very much about preparation and organization. Being prepared for your meeting/project/etc. and being on time, allows you to manage your work and to achieve success. Being late and not prepared sets you up for failure.

Internalizing these lessons allows us to think through situations and react in logical manners to the situations at hand, and this increases the odds of success.

A tried and true maxim about baseball is that you cannot teach running, but you can teach the rest of the skills necessary to play. However, if you cannot run, you will not be a good player. It is similar for project managers: you cannot teach analytical thinking, but you can teach the skills of project management. If you can think through situations calmly and objectively, then you are more apt to succeed.

A project manager is above else the project leader and knowing how to think through the situations at hand and how to plan for issues before they happen is an invaluable tool. The Art of War is a valuable tool for learning how to think.

Flawless Consulting

Flawless Consulting may seem to be a relic of an earlier age (I read the original version, not the updated copy) and a prime example of 1970’s pop-psychology. However, to dismiss it as simplistic pop-psychology would be a mistake. It offers us unique insights into how to read and interact with people and overall how to act like a consultant. 

We often focus on the tasks that make up the project when we are project managers, but it is the people involved: clients, staff and management which are the true challenges. Flawless Consulting teaches us to look at look at how we interact with the people involved in the process, how to understand their motivations, their verbal and non-verbal communications.  These skills are vital to the success of the project.

“Too often, we take the easy road and ignore the underlying issues.”

By taking the time to understand the people involved in the project, allows us to understand how to manage the situation.  It enables us to change the way we behave and communicate to make sure we are heard and achieve our goals. 

An important point we often discuss in our internal project management meetings is how to balance our goals and our efforts to ensure we meet our goals. A question I often ask: “Is it more important to achieve your goals, or to achieve them in the manner you wish to?” Flawless Consulting teaches us to understand our audiences and how to communicate with them in manners which ensures the outcome we envision. Being a consultant is a mindset and it is useful to know how to act like one no matter what our professional role. 

Making Things Happen: Master Project Management (formerly The Art of Project Management)

This is the updated edition of the bestselling O’Reilly book by former Microsoft Program Manager Scott Berkun. Written in down-to-earth plain language, the book offers an examination of the real world trade-offs and decision making tools for getting things done. Berkun excels at explaining both the social aspects of having multiple stakeholders, as well as technical topics of handling deadlines and constraints. The focus is on software and internet development, yet maintains a readable conversational style, and avoids geeky lectures.

Each of these books offers us valuable insights into mastering our craft.

Visit your favorite big box or grocery store online to find special offers available at your nearest stores and print coupons to use during your next visit. Simply type in your ZIP code and you have the same deals from the free-standing inserts (FSIs) found in your Sunday paper.

Now for the fun part: We’ve launched a turn-key solution for creating electronic FSIs that attract customers to local retail stores or to your site. We’re not talking about just uploading a PDF. We’re talking about creating elegant, interactive environments to advertise multiple products, complete with 360-degree product views and videos to highlight specific features. Customers can print coupons, save products to a wish list, and email themselves both to use later. We make it easy to update text and images, too. To learn more about the eFSI and to arrange a demo, email business@solutionset.com

People talk about your company in online communities all the time. Do you know what they’re saying on Twitter? Facebook? Amazon? On your own community site? Get a handle on the buzz, find out how you stack up against the competition, and play an active role in shaping public opinion—build a social media monitoring and engagement strategy. It’s the most critical step in delivering value back to your customers.

We’ve led community strategy and development initiatives for more than two dozen publicly traded companies. Our solution: Make it easy for your team to find out what’s being said, share intelligence, collaborate on responses, and engage the public. To make it happen, we build on the Jive platform. We’ve found it to be the most enterprise-ready social business platform for public and private communities. Thanks to the recent acquisition of Filtrbox, Jive has reached a new level of learning and engagement. Separate modules make it easy to:

• Monitor the social web through powerful, easy-to-use dashboards. The foundation of a good social strategy starts with listening. Discover what people are saying about your brand and how they’re responding to your campaigns. Learn what questions they’re asking and what’s being said about your competitors.

• Share insights across your marketing, sales, support, and product development teams. Measure and discuss real-time chatter and how it impacts your strategies. Discuss your opportunities to control the flow of information, moderate discussions, and respond.

• Engage customers by turning your insights into actions, whether that’s responding to issues, countering misinformation, tuning marketing campaigns, or making changes to products. This allows you to build credibility and with it, a following. It’s that following that gives you the opportunity to market to customers and drive different types of transactions.

• Track and analyze how well people are responding to your message. See how social trends relate to commerce, including click-through to your product pages, how many community registrants convert to new customers, and if existing community members have increased purchases year over year.

Is it important to measure, track and optimize both market and direct engagement metrics. Market engagement is activity on third-party communities like Twitter, Facebook, and specialty industry sites, measuring your number of followers/fans, retweets, Facebook comments and links, and improved search engine ranking. Direct engagement happens on your own public-facing support site, partner site, or comment area. For example, the number of members in the community, unique visitors, page views, and subscribers to your blog’s RSS feed.

When you have the big picture, your teams can effectively engage customers. Ultimately, you’ll create the community of enthusiastic followers that evangelizes your brand and products.

Having a mobile strategy and presence does not need to be a difficult proposition. Sometimes the simplest tools can add big benefit. In a recent article on the website Mobile Marketer, Dan Butcher identifies the six trends affecting mobile marketing and commerce.

The trends are:

• increased Smartphone sales and usage
• dramatic increase in mobile Web usage
• mobile commerce adoption grows
• mobile search becomes essential
• multichannel marketing mix expands
• market fragmentation continue

To anyone who has an iPhone or other Smartphones, these trends seem obvious as we reflect on our own behavior and map them back to consumers at large.

Mobile strategies are multifold and depend on your business, marketing, and revenue goals. But as marketers, we must understand the need to respond to these trends and to use the platform to meet our objectives. This will not always involve the development of a ground-breaking strategy or the launch of an iPhone app that is featured in the store, but can be as simple as enabling our current sites to be useful and readable in a Smartphone’s form factor.

Strategies will evolve as we understand user behavior and must take into account how, when, and where consumers interact with their devices. Much as TV marketing strategies are different from online/web/pc-based strategies, mobile device users have different goals and must be communicated in a unique way.

Apps are a key element of mobile marketing, but are still very nascent as marketers understand how to interact with consumers.  For now, utility is the name of the game. Top apps (as is true with websites) make it easier for consumers to do something, not just to be entertained.

The lowest hanging fruit is to launch a mobile-enabled version of your site or elements of your site. With the proliferation of Smartphones, more consumers are using their mobile devices to visit websites for commerce and information. Thus, it should be an integral part of all marketing efforts to have a web presence which allows consumers to interact with the brand in a manner specific to the smaller real-estate available on the browser.

A great example of this is the mobile version of the VW site. This site simplifies those tasks which a mobile user would be most interested in: reviewing car models, finding a dealer, and contacting road-side assistance. This is all designed for the form-factor of the phone and offers a very unique and valuable experience to the consumer, which is a different from the experience of going to the main VW website from a Smartphone.

The trends will only continue as the adoption of mobile is ramping faster than desktop internet did and will be bigger than we think.