Web 2.0 --- is it killing email? By Bob Cefail

By Bob Cefail:

Email is huge. But will it be known to the next generation like the 8 track tape is today?

This article got me thinking. Part of the reason the piece got printed is because of the PR departments of myspace and facebook, no question about that, but there was one interesting finding.

Among teenagers, text messaging and social networking are more and more being used in place of email, to the point that email is just used by teenagers when they need to communicate with adults. That's a big change, and will really cause a shift in the next few years.

I am going to coin a new word which you heard here first. Splext= Spam text messaging. As hundreds of millions of text messages get sent, people will be inundated by text messages the same as they are being inundated with email currently. Right now there are sites that let people send anonymous text messages to unsuspecting users. Just wait a couple years and see.

For marketers, hoooah! A whole new market and opportunity, for people that learn the ins and outs of how to engage people with their brands and forge relationships using social networking.

Check out the article below, and let me know what you think

Bob Cefail

SAN FRANCISCO--The future of e-mail might be found on the pages of MySpace.com and Facebook.

Just ask a group of teen Internet entrepreneurs, who readily admit that traditional e-mail is better suited for keeping up professional relationships or communicating with adults.

"I only use e-mail for my business and to get sponsors," Martina Butler, the host of the teen podcast Emo Girl Talk, said during a panel discussion here at the Mashup 2007 conference, which is focused on the technology generation. With friends, Bulter said she only sends notes via a social network.

"Sometimes I say I e-mailed you, but I mean I Myspace'd or Facebook'ed you," she said.

To be sure, much has been written about the demise of e-mail, given the annoyance of spam and the rise of tools like instant messaging, voice over IP and text messaging. But e-mail has hung on to its utility in office environments and at home, even if it's given up some ground to new challengers. It may be that social networks are the most potent new rival to e-mail, one of the Internet's oldest forms of communication. With tens of millions of members on their respective networks, MySpace and Facebook can wield great influence over a generation living online, either through the cell phone or the Internet.

"I don't know any teen who doesn't have a phone with them all the time."

--Catherine Cook, president,
MyYearbook.com

And if you're among those who believe teens are the future, then e-mail could be knocked down a rung. For example, Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online, a virtual world for teens and college kids, describes the age group as "the first and early adopters of new trends. Things they are doing are what everyone will be doing in five years."

To hear the teen panelists tell it, that means e-mail will be strictly the domain of business dealings.

"If I'm talking to any friends it's through a social network," said Asheem Badshah, a teenaged president of Scriptovia.com, an essay-sharing site that launched this summer. "For me even IM died, and was replaced by text messaging. Facebook will replace e-mail for communicating with certain people."

Almost on cue, a Microsoft executive sitting in the audience chimed in with a question to the teens, saying that given his work, he's "interested in people not using e-mail." He asked the panelists to comment about the fact that e-mail transmits to mobile devices, for example. Also, Facebook will send its members an e-mail anytime someone sends them a message on the social network.

Butler replied that she uses Facebook on her cell phone. "I need (Facebook) everywhere I go, but I log into e-mail only once a week," she said.

More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging.

Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old founder and president of MyYearbook.com, was the lone teen entrepreneur who said she still uses e-mail regularly to keep up with camp friends or business relationships. Still, that usage pales in comparison to her habit of text messaging. She said she sends a thousand text messages a month.

"It's a problem for teens--you're like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one (social network)."

--Asheem Badshah, president,
Scriptovia.com

"I don't know any teen who doesn't have a phone with them all the time," Cook said.

Still, the age group is a fickle bunch. All of the panelists said that they're constantly looking for the next, new thing to stay current with friends; and they often use different social networks and tools to keep up with different sets of people.

Cook, for example, said she uses her own social network MyYearbook to talk to her friends from school, but she uses Facebook to keep up with what's happening at Georgetown University, where she plans to attend school in the fall. Cook blogs at MySpace as a way to meet new friends, and she's also on LinkedIn to mine new professional relationships.

"Teens are on lots of sites and picking and choosing activities from each one," she said. "It's based on who you actually want to talk to."

Similarly, Ashley Qualls, president of WhateverLife, a graphical tool for users of MySpace, said she keeps adding on new social networks to her roster of memberships online. "People leave a trail of where they decide to go," she said.

Badshah said that to subscribe to only one social network means losing out on friendships with people who are active on other rival social networks. That's because having real estate on MySpace or Facebook means keeping tabs with only certain friends through messaging, blogs and recent photos. That the two major social networks don't interoperate could be reason for a new social network that could act as an intermediary to aggregate friends in one place, Badshah said, much the way Trillian did for IM applications like Yahoo and AOL.

"It's a problem for teens--you're like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one," he said.

"To have all your buddy lists in one place, that's where this is going," Badshah said.

Send insights or tips on this topic to stefanie.olsen@cnet.com.

Google Hacks anyone can do- by Bob Cefail

Here's another Bob Cefail Internet Search tip:

A lot of people aren't familiar with Google's advanced search features, which are very powerful, so lets rectify this a bit, shall we?

One of the easiest, coolest things to do is to tweak the search results you want by the simple
use of the - (hyphen) symbol.

Lets say you want to search for information about mice. Ok great, you type in mice into Google, which looks like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mice&btnG=Search

Ok, now some of the sites coming up aren't really all that great, because Google doesn't know if you mean the rodent, or the electronic kind we all know and love.

To get all the rodent results out, you just search for mice -rodent

This takes all the rodent related results out. One of my favorites if I am researching something is to use -com which takes out all the dot com results and usually gives me much better information, scholarly articles, etc.

People that are familiar with Google Adwords will recognize this technique immediately as "negative keywords" and yes it really is the same thing pretty much, except this was built into Google regular search long before it was used in the adwords advertising program.

So the above search with the "negative keywords" would look like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mice+-rodent&btnG=Search

As you can see, the search results are much changed. You can change them even further by eliminating words like -gaming if you are more interested in a regular mouse, and do lots of tweaks from there.

Until Next Time,

Bob Cefail

Bob Cefail on the sales pipeline

So you want a thriving successful business.

You want customers and money pouring in the door.

You want an abundance of new sales leads and deals coming in.

This goes to the heart of marketing and I am going to share with you one of the biggest secrets in having a successful business.

First of all, marketing is not sales. Most business owners think marketing IS sales. It is true that successful marketing will result in sales, but marketing and sales are quite different. Marketing is a big subject, there are thousands of books written about it, and covering the whole subject is beyond the scope of this article, but in the time I have here I CAN share one golden secret guaranteed to blow the roof off of your sales if you do this right. Fair enough?

Whether you have 200 salespeople in your company, or if you are the only one, there is a principle that you can apply to increase the efficiency of your sales and marketing process, and increase your profits. It works like this. To understand it, we have to work backwords from a completed sale and look at the 4 major hurdles you have. These are going to be what you are going to measure.

Before you have a sale, you have to have a qualified prospect. Before you have the qualified prospect, you have to have separated out that prospect from a few that for whatever reason, weren’t really qualified, either financially or because what you have to offer just isn’t right for those people. Before those people came to you, they had to be a sales lead of some kind. Before they become a sales lead, they had to have seen some promo from you and responded, or they have to have responded to a free offer, a free download, some type of thing you offered to get them interested and start your sales process. And, importantly, they had to have read something that you had, a brocure, a website, a report, something that caused them to believe YOU might have the thing they were seeking. And before that you had to identify who this prospect is and what communication channels they might use in seeking help or information about someone like you, or you had to do some advertising somewhere. It also really, really, really helps to have done a survey of your target market so you know what it is that they expect before you make your offer or create your promotional piece.

But lets not get overly complex here. Lets just look at each part of the sales process and maximize each part. This is where the magic comes in. So in your promotion you spend x dollars by advertising in 3 different magazines, a few people call, a few of those turn into prospects, some are sent a sales proposal, and at the end of the pipeline, a few of them close and turn into money and pay you. Many business owners freak out if this cycle fails, and blame the advertising publication or medium because its the start of the whole pipeline, and this is not always the culprit.

In order to analyze and maximize this pipeline, here are a few key things you should do:

You must, must, must track every phone call that comes in, or every response of your website and ask this very important question to everyone; “how did you hear about us?”

Train your receptionist or answering service to do this with everyone. On the internet, this can be automated easily by software.
You can find out what website and what keyword or ad worked easily.

Note down for a month how many responses come in from each advertising source. Next note how many people were qualified buyers from each publication. Next note down of the qualified buyers, what percentage of them made it through the sales pipeline and turned into actual sales.

So we have 3 things you are measuring;
Raw initial response to your advertising
The relative quality of those responses
The number of qualified prospects you actually closed as a percentage

Now here is where the magic comes in. You don’t have to double your advertising budget to get double your sales. All you have to do is make each step 25% more efficient and you will have a huge increase. Lets look at this;

We advertise in 3 publications and get:
20 raw responses to advertising
10 qualified prospects
5 actual closes

Alright this is arbitrary but plausible

We then work on one thing at a time in the sales pipeline and just do this:

1) We make a better ad and get 25 responses instead of 20. A 25% increase. (You could also change the publication/advertising medium if it is really not working for you.) If you want to know if you have a good ad, call us at 727 465-0925 and we'll give you our opinion for free. How do you make a better ad? There's lots of ways, but for now, just try something you think will make the ad better after pretending you are a potential prospect and looking at your ad. Usually something stands out immediately that you can do.

2) We target the ad a little better with survey data, and drill the salespeople on how to qualify prospects correctly, and adjust the product line to make sure that we are really offering people what it is they said they wanted. We only get a 25% increase here, but we have 25 to start with, but we now have 12 or 13 qualified prospects.

3) We then drill the sales people on how to really sell, since there is no reason that we can’t get our closing ratio up from 50% to 75%, all other things being equal. In this step you might have to do a little competition research, and be clever in how you are going to sell your product and overcome sales objections etc, but with drilling of the salespeople this can be accomplished. There are always top salespeople that the other salespeople can learn from, and you can find free Bob Cefail tips on selling in Google Video and Youtube if you run out of ideas. Usually the top salesperson you can promote to a sales manager with a little incentive to help the others. If we can make just a 25% improvement here this means that we close 9 or 10 prospects, almost DOUBLE what we were doing before and spending the SAME amount on our advertising costs! One thing that is absolutely vital is SPEED of follow up. The number one failure we find is people are calling in, and they aren't gotten back to immediately, when they are hot. This will kill your sales pipeline and is easily remedied. With any of these things implemented, we can easily get our 25% increase.

4) After going through this process once, you may find that advertising in one publication over another makes a huge difference in the actual results you get. It might be that one publication, or website seems to send you much more qualified prospects, or one just flat out sends you more prospects that BUY. Are you tracking which responses come from which publication? You should be. With this data in hand, you can then put your advertising dollars into the thing that actually worked better with a bigger ad, more locations for the same size ad, similar publications, etc. and bingo you just boosted your results even more!

There are all kinds of other things we can do here to maximize these areas even further. Here are a couple more ideas:

-Offer something FREE to cast a wider net in your advertising. A free download, a free report, something tangible. A free consultation people pretty much smell as a sales pitch. Offer something tangible instead, that lets you capture their identity and follow up, but doesn’t obligate them.

-Do a survey so you can identify and test different advertising copy. Don’t be scared. Yes good market research from a qualified market research company is valuable and it isn’t cheap. But it does pay for itself many times over. And there are many types of things you can do that cost nothing, but get you valuable data to use in your marketing efforts. Look at your customers. Which 5 people paid you the most this year. Why did they go with you? How did they find your company? Why are they happy with you? Open your ears and you can find out a lot.

-Make sure that you get the name and email address of your customers, and people that get your “freebies” and send them tips and helpful information about the subject you are knowledgeable in. Don't bombard them with ads. Truly send them valuable information that will help them.

-Look at the key personnel in this sales pipeline and make sure that they are not turning away business. Actually call in to your own office from somewhere, or get a "secret shopper" person to do this, ask for their opinion about what happened and note down what you find. A sour receptionist or a poor salesperson will kill your results. Fix them or replace them.

There are a ton of other things you can do. For more information, call In Touch Media Group at 727 465-0925 and we'll look at your ad for free, and tell you what we think.

Bob Cefail on the wiretapping of American citizens

Here's what the buzz today is about followed by my comments.

From wired magazine;

"A federal judge rebuffed an effort by media organizations, ranging from the Associated Press to Wired News, to unseal whistleblower documents in a civil rights group's case against AT&T for allegedly helping the government's warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

Those documents include technical diagrams provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in January 2005 by former AT&T engineer Mark Klein, a written declaration by Klein, and an evaluation of the documents by former FCC employee J. Scott Marcus."

There is a lot more on the actual page here http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/02/spy_docs_stay_s.html

I left my comments there, but in short, it is time for judges, especially federal judges to start standing up to the Bush administrations heavy handed tactics in citing "national security" to justify many things that have never been considered "American" True American values are the preservation of liberty, and pushing for an open, honest, and above all, ACCOUNTABLE government

Bob Cefail

Second Life Presidential candidates by Bob Cefail

From Slashdot today we have the following

politics 2.0 writes "It may not be an official effort "yet” but thanks to a grass-roots effort, John Edwards has become the first presidential candidate to set-up-shop in Second Life. Jerimee Richir, whose avatar is called Jose Rote, paid-for and developed Edwards' virtual headquarters, and, on a voluntary basis, is managing the in-world campaign. Considering that Second Life's user numbers are much smaller than other social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook ”aside from generating press coverage” will campaigning in Second Life actually win many votes? Rote says yes, and that "Second Life users are a unique audience, in that, they are first adopters. It is a smaller community, but I would argue it is a more influential community.'"

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/91149879/article.pl

This may or may not have a huge effect on elections in two years, but it is a sign of the times that blogging, the internet, and the blogosphere are having a huge impact on what once was "business as usual"

In the last election, none of the experts could calculate the influence of the internet on politics but I would argue that it is a growing force, and in a few years, a force to be reckoned with.

Bob Cefail at technorati

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Blogging For Fun and Profit

Actually, blogging is best done first for fun, and then for profit. However, it is interesting that one can use blogs (or "web logs") to help marketing one's business in a number of ways.

Probably one of the more informative contemporary articles on this whole subject of blogging is entitled: "Entering the blogosphere-Don't Rush In". Here's a brief excerpt:

"Summing up the blogosphere in a newsletter is impossible. So instead I have decided to guide you down a path so that you can better understand blogs on your own terms based on your own interests."

This is a great article for the Blogging beginner who wants to get a feel for the whole subject.