MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

With our June 10 web clinic, Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?” featuring special guests Jason Breed and Marc Meyer, we knew we had a full house going into the session.

But we never expected to break into Twitter’s top 10 trending topics by taking down a chunk of the interwebs.

What our crew and 1,001 clinic participants also didn’t expect was that the webinar hosting service would go down three times due to a “service disruption … a result of unscheduled maintenance in our network.” Nice.

Despite all that, we managed to plow through the webinar and we’d like to send a special thank you to the 862 folks who stayed with us. This post includes some answers to your questions from the web clinic.

You can now access the presentation: Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?”

Pamela Jesseau, our razor-sharp new content queen, tackled the following clinic questions to help you set up your Twitter account, build your following, and expand your business. (Also check out her post: Twitter for businesses: 7 articles + tools you don’t want to miss.)

Q: How do I search Twitter for mentions of my company? What do I do with the results?

The simplest way is to use the search box in the right-hand sidebar of your Twitter page, or Twitter’s search page at search.twitter.com.  These will find mentions of your keyword within all Tweets.

One tool that was featured in the web clinic is Twazzup, a third-party application that can help you track mentions of your brand. Just enter your company name or search string to find out who is Tweeting about you. For example, the image below shows a search for a company that was recently in the news in North Florida.

You can also set up a search string within an application like TweetDeck, which will alert you when someone sends a Tweet with your name. Then what? Listen to what they are saying, address their concerns, thank them for their feedback, and follow them to engage the conversation and build your community.

Q: What if your company name is too long for a good Twitter name?

Twitter only allows 15-character usernames, so there are many companies which have to improvise. We ran into this issue ourselves and abbreviated MarketingExperiments to @MktgExperiments.

Your Twitter handle should still make sense and be fairly easy for people to remember.  Other examples of organizations that got around this issue using abbreviations, shortened forms, or acronyms include:

• @pdxtrailblazers – Portland Trailblazers
• @SBoSM – SmartBrief on Social Media
• @TheHSF – The Heart & Stroke Foundation
• @MarriottIntl – Marriott International

Q: If you are not tweeting with a big following, what is the point?

Everyone has to start somewhere.  You can build on a small following by first engaging and bringing value to those that do follow you.

Add yourself to the user-generated Twitter directory WeFollow and choose three tags that describe your business and industry — such as marketing, SEO, and software for example.  Others with similar profiles will find you when they are looking to expand their networks.  In turn, take the time to search for people in your target group and follow them.  But don’t stop there — start a conversation.  Retweet an article you found valuable, or start a discussion on a topic relevant to your sector.

Fridays provide the opportunity for you to recommend a colleague or partner by Tweeting their name to others and tag it with #followfriday. Some may return the favor, or at least tweet a thanks with your name to their followers. (Learn more about #followfriday and other hashtags at … wait for it … Mashable.)

Build and nurture your following, the same way you might do with other leads. You wouldn’t try to hard sell a new prospect in person, would you? So don’t do it on Twitter. Build the relationship, get your brand and yourself out there, and be there to respond to feedback.

Q: I understand why someone would have a lot of followers. But how can you follow thousands of people? It’s not manageable. It doesn’t make sense to me. Any advice on this would be great.

One of the most valuable tools that we have found for smart Twittering is TweetDeck. As mentioned above, this free application allows you to manage the tweets you receive with columns of separate, customizable feeds and filters.

You can group certain people, and create search strings to monitor mentions of your company, industry and even competitors. That way you can skip all the weather updates and lunch reports, without missing the feedback on your product, or opportunities to connect.

Q: Any results on running price specials via Twitter?

Dell Computer made news earlier this year when it revealed that $1 million in sales could be attributed to their Twitter feeds. Dell has several feeds, each targeting different segments. As we discussed in the web clinic, the company used @DellOutlet to Tweet discounts with a link to purchase the product from the Outlet Store. Shortly afterward, Dell started to offer exclusive deals to its followers. Twitter is still an emerging channel, but results like these show it does have real value for businesses.

Twitter training: Putting practical know-how into action to drive business results

In addition to the questions above, the live audience polls from our web clinic indicated that many marketers still aren’t sure how to use Twitter to improve their bottom line.

That’s why we are pleased to be able to team up again with Jason Breed, Senior Director of Business Development of Neighborhood America, and Marc Meyer, CEO of Digital Response Marketing Group, for a new training eWorkshop on using Twitter to boost your business results.

While our free web clinics provide new research findings, case studies and actionable ideas, our training eWorkshops are designed to help you advance from the “what” and “why” to the “how” and “how-to” with detailed, hands-on guidance and tools.

In this interactive eWorkshop, you’ll learn specifics on:

• Where to start (or restart) and how to map out your Twitter presence/s
• How to develop the most effective Twitter business strategy for your organization
• Ways to build and engage a following that’s more than just a numbers game
• Tools that will help you save time and maximize your efforts

eWorkshop: How to use Twitter to boost your business results
Tuesday, June 30
4:00 to 5:00 p.m. EDT
Training session: $129

Join us if you want to accelerate your knowledge, cut down on the learning curve, and start using Twitter to drive revenue, build equity and decrease costs.

Twitter web clinic attendees can save $30 on this eWorkshop when registering with the special savings code. Please check your clinic follow-up email for the code and secure your spot for this special training eWorkshop. (We’ll keep the interwebs intact this time.)

I guess it was bound to happen. For last Wednesday’s web clinic — Optimizing Your Ecommerce Site — we packed in a bunch of research, special guest Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa, and two new case studies with gains of up to 56%.

We had a great crowd, lots of live Q&A, a cool contest — and, sadly, a vaporized recording. So you can now access the presentation in our standard research brief format (with all the charts, key points and takeaways from the session); however, the flash version is in the ether. Sorry about that.

Back to some good news, eh?

The five clinic participants who will receive a free copy of the 2009 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide are:

1. Cathryn Foster of Dot Zinc
2. Amy Wang of JPMorgan Chase
3. Richard Flaherty of CambridgeSoft Corporation
4. Bethany Siegler of UniqueThink
5. Tom Gray of Gray eMarketing

More good news?

Thanks to your feedback, we’re expanding our web clinics in several new ways, including: teaming up with more featured guests, pulling in more case studies and research from our community of marketers, and tackling some new topics.

A perfect example is our free web clinic next Wednesday, June 10: Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the “now what?”

Sign up for the free Twitter clinic, join the @MktgExperiments team, and keep an eye on the hashtag #webclinic in the days to come. Oh, and please share with your tweeps, too.

Last Wednesday’s web clinic — B2B Success Stories: Four tests with gains of 21% to 254% — was the second in our series featuring case studies and test results from our course and clinic participants.

Like the B2C Success Stories clinic, we included a contest and offered three clinic participants the chance to win one of our optimization certification training courses. Our three B2B contest winners, chosen at random, will have their choice of Fundamentals of Online Testing, Landing Page Optimization, or the Email Marketing course.

This clinic’s three lucky winners are:

1. PKWARE — a data security and file compression software company
2. LexisNexis –  a global research and information publisher serving several B2B markets
3. Research In Motion (RIM) — the brains behind the BlackBerry and other tech products

Along with a hearty congratulations to our winners, and a special thank you to Scott Lindberg, Jessica Carter, and June Macdonald, respectively, for participating in the B2B clinic and entering the contest, the MarketingExperiments team also wishes to thank the people and organizations whose case studies we featured in the clinic itself: Jeff Taxdahl of ThreadLogic, Sarah Frazier and Joe Haddock of Summit Business Media, Jake Atwood of BuzzBuilderPro, and Matt Dombrow of Clixo, who also joined our team to present his test results live.

As we discussed in the clinic, building relationships is about more than just tossing around the catch phrase. While we continue to look for (and test) ways to interact with our audience, and build a community around trying to “discover what really works” in optimization, we are grateful for the opportunity to hear about your successes and insights, share them, and continue to learn from them together as part of our research. We simply could not do this without your input.

Have some test results you’d like to share? Plug them into the comments field below.

It’s not often that I get jazzed about the topic of media relations. In fact, it’s usually just the opposite.

As an editor, ducking clumsy pitches (in all media) and screening calls are part of the job. But while working in the marcom trenches, I learned to sympathize with PR folks who have to deal with editors and reporters, and the often unfair bad rap that PR has to overcome.

The eye-opener? Working with a media relations pro who set the gold standard for the job.

PR 2.0 or Relationships 101?

It was never about cranking out banal press releases or heavy-handed pitches. Instead, she did hours of research, became a subject expert in her clients’ fields, provided compelling, relevant story ideas to the right journalists at the right times — and did all the right things to build relationships. She asked incisive questions, knew her stuff, and in turn, earned enormous respect. On a tight budget, too.

Prominent coverage followed. Major papers, tv news, trade pubs. Clip files that many organizations only dream about. And all pre-Twitter.

Social media doesn’t change everything

These days, with social media, Twitter and Facebook generating so much buzz, things are getting simultaneously easier and harder. Sure, these avenues can help you get your foot in the door easily with some media types, but others have already barred the social media door to PR. Are you linking in — or spamming? How do you figure out not only whom to approach, but how?

That brings us right back to the gold standard: relationship building.

Let’s face it, with or without social media, for many of us not named Godin, Kawasaki, Brogan or Battelle, cultivating relationships can still be time-consuming, hard work. It’s not always fun and there are no guaranteed shortcuts.

But there are tools that can help you get and stay organized, and make the process of building your media relationships much more efficient. And that’s what I’m jazzed about.

A special media relations eWorkshop and toolkit

Today at 4:00 p.m., we’re kicking off our new eWorkshop series with a session on building an effective, sustainable media relations program, including a half-dozen tools plus a campaign playbook.

After reviewing the toolkit, and seeing the components in action, I’m convinced that pros and novices alike will benefit from the tools and strategies in this special eWorkshop.

So no matter what your experience level, with the stakes getting higher every day, why not carve out an hour this afternoon to join us and raise your media relations game?

[Links updated to point to completed eWorkshop presentation.]

For our recent B2C success stories web clinic, we took a new approach with our case studies — and turned the spotlight on our audience.

Our team walked through test results from four sites and how they achieved gains of up to 300% by applying key principles of the MarketingExperiments Conversion Sequence. (MP3 audio of the clinic is here; full presentation will be available soon.)

As a way of celebrating those gains, and helping others achieve them, we also included a special contest with this clinic: three attendees, selected at random, would win an on-demand MarketingExperiments Certification Course of their choice, including Fundamentals of Online Testing, Landing Page Optimization, and Email Marketing.

Now we’re pleased to announce the three contest winners …

1. OperationSmile.org – a site that mobilizes volunteers and donors around the world to help repair childhood facial deformities.

2. Stockhouse.com — a community website for investors, offering a variety of market information.

3. HomeScienceTools.com — an ecommerce site that offers an array of science materials to families and teachers.

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to Matt Burghdoff, Ann-Marie Fleming, and Amanda Schaner, respectively, for entering our contest and participating in this special clinic. We look forward to featuring new success stories from your sites in a follow-up web clinic.

Coming soon: A B2B version of our audience case studies clinic, with a similar special contest. Don’t miss it. Get all the details via email or our RSS feed.

UPDATED 4/28: Join us for these virtual and live events

In addition to our free webinars, the MarketingExperiments team is expanding our online training — and hitting the road for a number of conferences and live optimization training and certification workshops.

Here’s a look at some of the places we’ll be in the weeks ahead:

eWorkshop: Media Relations Strategy + Tools
April 28 – Online Workshop with Demand Metric

Inbound Marketing Summit
April 28-29 – San Francisco, CA
(Use code: ‘Experiments’ and save $250)

Email Marketing Summit
May 12-13, Munich, Germany

SIPA 2009 Annual International Conference
May 31 – June 2 – Washington, DC

LATEST UPDATES:

We’ve added two new, on-site optimization training events to the calendar:

Live Landing Page Optimization Workshop (West Coast)
May 21 :: Dolce Hayes Mansion – San Jose, CA

Live Landing Page Optimization Workshop (Midwest)
May 26 :: Dallas Convention Center – Dallas, TX

Plus: Save $100 on these workshops with code ‘EARLY100′ when you sign up by May 1.

Note: We’ll be adding more event dates and locations across the U.S. and Europe to the calendar shortly. In the meantime, keep up to date on our training and presentations via the free MarketingExperiments Journal newsletter.