In this Marketing Over Coffee learn :
About Mindmaps, Line of Sight Net Income Framework and Big Brother! All this and more…
Show length 24:58
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00:57 The Marketing Over Coffee LinkedIn Group is still rolling – Mindmaps – FreeMind vs. MindManager? iThoughts HD on the iPad. Chris uses an AidaCase bluetooth keyboard, John recommends the Griffin Loop and a stylus. Otter Case looks good.
07:32 Line of Sight Net Income Framework and Marketing
16:34 StumbleUpon now driving more traffic than Facebook
19:25 Last chance to nominate for the Marketing Over Coffee Awards
21:12 Microsoft Kinect can “see” you – A tweet from TheJamesMaxwell
23:17 Upcoming Events – The 25th Annual MOC Awards! Send in your nominations now via the nomination form.
24:08 Question of the Week –Why don’t you share your Google Custom Analytics Reports with us? And why haven’t you nominated anyone for a Marketing Over Coffee award? And, why haven’t you bought the MOC app from iTunes yet? Or The Marketing Over Coffee T-Shirt (and limited edition Beantown Version)
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
John Wall 0:19
Marketing over coffee I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn Today’s marketing over coffee brought to you by blue sky factory our email provider of choice. Get a link to their 50 ways to build your email list and toll free freedom virtual PBX. Great for small businesses and marketing campaigns get your own toll free number Main Menu greeting voicemail, all that stuff as little as 995 a month you can try it out on the marketing over coffee comment line at triple 83232771 So Happy New Year, welcome to the cold 2011 and so we are getting through it. We get the marketing over coffee LinkedIn groups still rolling very strong. A bunch of stuff over there. I had mind maps came up just couldn’t was always a great topic for new year because of vigor. Putting together go for the upcoming year, and what we want to accomplish in a mind mapping tool is always a good way to do that to organize your thoughts and try and figure out what’s
Christopher Penn 1:07
going on. See, I never got into my maps, how do you use it for goals and planning and stuff? Because I’ve seen you before quadrant one.
Unknown Speaker 1:14
Yeah. All right. So that’s, that’s a good point.
John Wall 1:17
Daniel, it’s, it’s a simple way to sort of make like flowcharts is the idea. And so every quarter I have a four quadrant one and the power it really you don’t see the power of what it’s doing. When you look at the four quadrant thing because the four quadrant thing I do just to keep basically private, it just kind of shows what I’m doing along four fronts. I haven’t family professional financial, and and then just like development stuff that I want to do fun stuff. But the idea is that you can add it’s easy to add subtopics you know, on any one of those four top subtopics I clicked the cursor on there and I hit the Insert button and it just cranks out another subtopic. So the full the full diagram of all my goals is like you know, four levels deep. I mean, it’s like at the formation Kaggle agrees that I have minor categories, and then I have individual items after that. And then it does have like, much like Microsoft Project, every node, you can do a percentage complete and a note. And so you can run reports on that. So it’s, it’s just kind of an easy way to organize information that’s all over the place, you know, you get that visual map of it, I should probably I’ll make a dummy version of it and put it out on the site. I’ll post it as a, an image so people can kind of see what it what it does. But it is really great for organizing if you have a lot of info that spread all over the place. I’ve actually even played around this year when I was over at Suffolk for their weekend MBA program. I did instead of using PowerPoint, I actually used a mind map and just put it up on the screen and it is pretty cool. I mean, you just keep zooming around. And it runs on the on the iPad. So I was actually working it from my iPad and you can just zip around and you know telescope in when you want to hit a specific topic and then crank back out. They export to PDF, you can attach other docs to them. So it’s kind of a neat organizational tool as far as if you want. If you have tons of files to that you need to tie
Christopher Penn 3:06
into it. Do you use it professionally for like any kind of project management,
John Wall 3:10
I have in the past I don’t know. It’s everything is calendar based for me, I mean, I pretty much will just do a once a quarter a list of everything that needs to get done. And by the time you put everything in the calendar as far as the logistics for it, there’s no point I have used my Microsoft Project in the past for that kind of stuff. If you have projects that tend to slip or you have a lot of resources to manage, then those are good tools. But if it’s just you, it’s kind of overkill to go that that route there. You know, it’s good for brainstorming too. That’s another thing if you’re doing like exercises where you’ve got a whole bunch of people and because again, it helps you easily categorize stuff and try and organize what’s going on, you can see patterns in the data. You know, because if you’ve got subcategories setup, you can say okay, so we realized that 80% of what we want to see is, you know, in this quadrant over here or something like that. There’s two tools that I use mine manager by mind yet, which I’ve used for years, I got a copy of it a long time ago. It’s a gnome decks actually of all places. And there’s another one called free mind. And what I was thinking about doing is if there’s a free mind expert out there, we could do just kind of hop on GoToWebinar and do a quick session and each of us show off what the product can do. And let people see what it’s all about. I thought that would be kind of cool, because I’d be interested in
Unknown Speaker 4:27
what free minds able to do. And and mind map is one use
John Wall 4:32
the ones on the iPad, it runs on a PC or Mac. And then pretty much everybody seemed to be in agreement. There’s a program I thought HD, which is the version to run on the iPad because it imports and exports most of the major types of software. And so it’s kind of cool, you can email it to your iPad. And if you open it up in the mail client, it will actually kick the app off and do it and then when you’re done with it, you just email it back and you can sync the files while you’re got the cable connected or whatever it seems like the emails The easiest way to do that. So that’s the the map angle on that. Let’s see, what else do we have other stuff in the group, anything that you saw, just the
Christopher Penn 5:12
iPad accessory stuff. I know people were always batting around all the latest and greatest toys, this device still lay, you know, swear by this. This one case, it’s an ad case that I think we have we’ve had on the show in the past and stuff, but it’s a Bluetooth keyboard built into the case. And it’s it’s very nice because you don’t have to carry the you know, and the other keyboards around at the same time. The battery in the case and the keyboard lasts for about two and a half to three weeks, which is you know, very, very good performance. And the thing I like most about it, the thing that where it’s actually useful is at trade shows and stuff. It’s a sealed keyboard so silicone sealed keyboards so you know if you have at the tradeshow booth or something and someone comes up and just you know dumps their coffee on it, you’re not in you’re not in a world of hurt about it, which is kind of nice.
John Wall 5:55
That’s how do you like the the keyboard action too. I mean, can you type on it,
Christopher Penn 5:58
I can type on it fairly well. It is the keys are small. So if you have you know, serial killer size hands, then you’re gonna find that it’s gonna be a little a little cramped. But if you are used to typing on smaller devices and stuff feel to get in just fine. The keys are slightly large if you were one of the lucky folks to get while the olpc is the One Laptop per Child machines, the keys are very, very similarly sized to that so they’re perfect for kids. They’re Okay, if you have you know, normal sized hands. If you have small hands or small fingers, you’ll be happy. And if you have, you know, just you know, giant sausages for fingers and not so much
John Wall 6:33
right, right that stuff. But that’s you know, that’s no different than anything. It’s good. It’s a good case because it’s not much larger than just any of the other cases not 30 get the full keyboards. Right, exactly. That works. You know, I’ve been using that Griffin loop that Dave had sent over to us. You can just set it there and the cool thing I use is my desk just as my desk clock during the day because it’s nice to have a digital photo frame that has you know, great quality and still be able to see the time and have alarms and all that stuff. So that’s pretty cool. I have other stuff on that front, as somebody had just posted a link to an otter case, which looked pretty good was basically one of those indestructible cases, okay, if you’re somebody that’s going to end up dropping it once or twice a week, and you know, you know who you are, because there are plenty of people out there that have a hard time with that kind of stuff. Or, of course, if your kids are going to be used a lot is that it seemed like it was a pretty good case for that. You had line of sight net income framework. Okay, sound marketing.
Christopher Penn 7:28
Yeah. So this is something that came out last year, November that we’re working on, but I wanted to talk about it because there was some discussion we were talking about on the blue sky factory blog, actually about email marketing, being more of actually as a sales tool. And as a marketing tool. It’s, you know, it functions like a sales tool. The metrics that we measure, by it are our sales sort of actions in terms of open rate, click through rate, conversion rate and things like that. We don’t talk a whole lot about list growth, a list size, and, you know, in my perspective of marketing One of the biggest functions of marketing is to build audience you know, to get people to the table, so that you can show them you know what ideas or, or value you have to share. And emails really teraflex is really great at doing that, but you’re legally prohibited from doing that. It’s called spam. You can’t just go out and buy your million person lists. You used to be in the old days before legislation, but you can’t anymore. So with that capability taken away, you know, what’s left is more sales stuff. So I wanted to explain the line of sight income net income framework because it has it gives, you know, the reason why I think of marketing that way. At the end of the day, we as marketers have to, you know, help to contribute to the company’s bottom line and that income if we don’t, you know, if a company’s net income is negative, you’re losing your job eventually, you know, whether it’s a you know, $1 loss or a billion dollar loss. If you’re not making money, you’re not making money. The two levers that power that are margin and volume, you know, the value per transactional thing that brings you money? And then how much of how quickly you can do that, you know, on the if you break that down, say margins composed of income and expense, you know, how much can you charge for an item? How much does it cost you to make the item. That’s pretty clearly if your expenses that way your income you’re going out of business. And then on the volume side, which is where marketing and sales occur is the audience that you bring to the table, and then the actions you get them to take. If you as a marketer are really, really good at getting people to the table, you got millions and millions of people, you know, knocking on the door, but your sales mechanisms or your sales team can’t close the deal to save their lives. You’re still going out of business because you know, if a million people visit a website and one of them buys or probably nothing. So vice versa, if if your sales team can sell to everybody who you know, walks in the door and one person a year walks in the door, you’re still going out of business. So it’s a useful framework. Um, there’s a link over on my blog to the framework itself, but it kind of explains my perspective on marketing. So when you hear me say something like, email marketing is a formula, it really isn’t a sales tool. That’s why because to me, marketing is quantifiable output has got to be audience, you know, in the form of leads or qualified leads, or at least people who are paying attention. And I don’t know what what, what do you manage for the unquantifiable output of marketing?
John Wall 10:22
Yeah, let’s size renovates it, you know, everything in front of the sale. So it’s, you know, you back it up one step. It’s, you know, did the sales guys have enough opportunities? You know, usually figure they’re only gonna hit half the time or whatever the percentage is for York. And then from there, it’s okay, how did they get those opportunities? They’re gonna have leads, how many leads did you get? How many of those converted to opportunities? So really, it’s just the numbers behind it. It’s how many leads did you get in the door? How many of them became opportunities and how many one I mean, that’s the big, the big three for how you’re marketing the health of your marketing organization. A lot of b2c organization organizations will take it one step back further to and you start you Thinking about brand recognition and brand perception and things like that you measure well, who even knows we’re out there. For most b2b that’s, you know, a waste of time. I mean it, who cares? Even if everybody knows about you, if nobody’s buying? That’s that’s of no value to you, because there isn’t that beside an assumption that if people know about you, eventually they will buy and of course, that’s the that’s the the tenuous link that senior management is always crying about, you know, that there’s no, no proof that that’s the case. There’s plenty of examples of products that everybody knows about. nobody buys. pets.com Yeah, you know, it’s classic, the Napster model of you know, yeah, you’ve got 30 million people, but you don’t have any money. So it doesn’t matter how you get your you’re out of trouble.
Christopher Penn 11:41
Yeah, I mean, the only other area where marketing would eat at least in that fairly basic formula, that line of sight, you know, that marketing might have some impact, it would be on the income side, you know, and then this is more of a b2c thing as well if the if the ability of marketing can increase the intangible value of what you’ve got, then you can charge more money for it, you know, Apple’s gear is you know, there’s a decent amount of marketing behind it now Apple’s gear has to not suck in order for the marketing to work I mean, you know, the iPad is successful because it’s really good at what it does and things and so that’s you know, 99% product design and 1% telling people that hey, there’s something that you actually want to check out but it still comes down to you’ve got to have people to show it to otherwise it’s you know, the examples of you know, giving away a movie pass to seven people having a world hear about are fairly few and far between
John Wall 12:35
Yeah, I guess I was trying to think of stuff that still does exist that completely gets by on Marketing Cloud You know, I think you know, things like jewelry are still you know, by creating the brand and the impression and you know, just a feeling of this is important even though when you look at the the actual you know, the fact that of swatches more reliable, cheaper, faster, you know, people are still gonna buy the the Rolex Rolex, right. Yeah, there’s still a few Good slept in that segment. But, you know, I know the watch segment is just completely taking a beating. Yeah. But
Christopher Penn 13:06
the other thing that is important about that framework to me and this is something that’s more of a management thing is that at least for a marketing department, the one thing that would make me very nervous as if, you know, the effectiveness of marketing was measured by sales, because again, this can be a very big disconnect. If your sales team sucks, then all of your if you’re being judged on on net income alone, you were being held responsible for things you probably have no control over and stuff whereas, you know, lead volume and audience size, database size is something that you have direct control over.
John Wall 13:38
Yeah, and that’ll come down to just the sales force itself, too. I mean, literally, if you’re feeding everybody the leads, if you’ve even got just one sales guy that’s successful, you can say, Okay, look, you know, the the raw materials are there, right? It’s a matter of getting all the sales guys up to speed. If none of the sales guys are selling, then it could be a marketing issue or it could be even further up the chain to product marketing. right shoe, you know, your product just got stank. And that’s, you know, those products are all over the place. You know, sometimes it takes years to find out that nobody really wants what you’ve got. All the VC has been burned and I pile out front. And that’s and so it goes,
Christopher Penn 14:15
right. So your way of diagnosing the way things are broken and broken in the company is is looking at, if it’s some percentage of the Salesforce can actually sell it well, then it’s probably okay.
John Wall 14:29
It’s, you know, I mean, there’s definitely still work to be done. But yeah, you know, that is like a proof of concept. I mean, it’s like, Look, we gave these guys the names, and this guy is able to close it. So now the question is, why is one guy able to do it and the others aren’t? You know, that’s really the where you have to start dropping the hammer. And now, I guess, you know, one of the myths, I think, in sales is that there is the Uber sales guy, the guy who shows up with the Rolodex and it doesn’t matter how crappy the leads are. He’s just going to go through his Rolodex and close the deals. And I think that does happen in some situations. But I think that’s exceedingly rare. I think that That’s a lot of people with hope and wish that those people are out there. And now they’re really not, most of the sales folks I know, are immediately the first thing they do is start pounding the database, you know, then they’re not bringing their own. Because most of the time, even if they brought their own, they probably are bound by obligation not to talk to the guys that they just run they’re selling to. or the other. The other fallacy that people miss out on too is that, you know, if this guy has been so successful at the previous company, well, when he comes to your company, the budgets all gone and those big accounts, you know, if they just bought Oracle last week, they’re not going to be looking for a huge database this week. Right? You know, so you need to run with it. So yeah, it’s, and that’s where, you know, we get back to talking about sales and marketing have to, you know, have to be able to work together to go back in and at some point, you know, the finger pointing will stop and it’s gonna be like, okay, so we gave you these 35 leads, where did they go? And I think you you’ll see the same stuff on a smaller scale too. You’ll see that Okay, so we gave this guy 50 leads and the guy who closes everything He managed to break through to three guys and set up a meeting. And the folks that are doing terrible we gave him 50. And they had no meeting setup, right? You know, and you can look to and you just keep drilling down to it. Okay, so how many calls that they make? And usually the guy who’s got the three meetings set up, he made 250 calls over three weeks, right? And the guys that have no meetings made 40 calls. And it’s just kind of playing Farmville. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or, you know, yeah, did something that was not related to getting opportunities on the board.
Unknown Speaker 16:30
So that’s kind of the path that takes
Christopher Penn 16:32
looks like StumbleUpon still on fire.
John Wall 16:34
It’s not Yeah, yeah. So right in the mentioning Napster as we did stumble upon driving more traffic to social media sites than even Facebook. And but even the article that I’d read that it said that, you know, of course, nobody ever goes to stumble upon, right? It’s just used as the pass through. So while they’re doing great distress, referring traffic, there’s a real challenge as far as Okay, what are they going to do with that and how’s it going to go? And of course, there’s the fact that They’re generating more traffic and the stumble upon audiences tiny I think 14 million maybe was the number that they had compared to Facebook so huge difference in volume but yeah we’ve talked about that for years so it’s a great tool if you’re just going to look for cool stuff or if you need some quick clicks to throw on the pile. Yeah it definitely does a good job how qualified that traffic is is another question
Christopher Penn 17:23
we’ve in the in the past when I’ve used as a traffic building tool the quality is definitely a lot lower because it’s folks who are stumbling around possibly drunk you know they’re they’re not folks who are committed to it you know, I’m you don’t go to stumble upon when you want to buy a car. You got to stumble upon when you need to kill an hour on Friday. Right right. We
John Wall 17:43
look busy. Yeah, exactly. If you’ve got some spare time, you know, not enough time to do what you know to start a project. But you can’t just go do something else. So you start stumbling.
Christopher Penn 17:53
Yeah. Now that makes it really great if you if your blog is like a you know, a reader blog where you actually go into Read stuff there and then stumble upon is the exact audience we’re looking for. Because these are folks who need something to do.
John Wall 18:05
Yep. Yep, have a short window of time, and you need to burn some few minutes. Yeah, so that could get you. But yeah, as far as closing deals, not so
Christopher Penn 18:14
much, not so much. The one thing that StumbleUpon I saw recently is I just jumped back in there not too long ago, the one thing they are doing a very good job of is, is trying to bind in and bring in the other social networks. So you can connect to StumbleUpon, via Twitter, via Facebook and stuff like that. So if you’ve got a, you know, a large network, it really seems like, you know, they, they’re able to leverage that and find those connections. And you can get that, that flow of traffic up and running much faster than you could in the old days. And we took a look at it about a couple years ago. And if you had a network, it was it was an incredible tool. If you didn’t have the network, it was a fairly tough slog to get rolling with it. And now it’s you know, it’s funny when you look at Twitter, it’s Twitter’s becoming sort of the hub of a lot of these networks, you know who you’re following and who’s following you whenever you connect to anything else. Twitter seems to be the you know, the go to network and stuff. So really, if you’re, I would say, you know, if you’re looking at this year where to start building if you’re if you’re still behind the times Twitter is definitely the place to, to start building out that infrastructure.
John Wall 19:13
Yeah, it’s everything’s tying in now that they’re user authentication and everything seems to be pretty tight and they seem to be gathering the volume quickly. That sounds good. Alright, so this is the last week to nominate for the marketing over coffee awards. I sent an email blast last night just trying to get a few more in for last minute again, there’s no charge. This is free. This is not a try and get john and Chris to the islands kind of plot. Yeah, just yeah, we’re just trying to get the best stuff out there. It’s a great chance for you know, listeners to showcase their stuff. If you’ve seen anything cool over the past year, we’d love to hear about it and give you some press. So that’s the story behind the awards. You may even get your logo on the side of a mug. This is that you can actually get the marketing over coffee mug which I will have to order in the next couple of weeks. Probably once we finalize this But yeah, by next week, the nominations will be closed. And yeah, we’ll probably announce final, the nomination list next week. And I’ll start to work on getting the voting together to see who can who will win the 2011 Awards.
Christopher Penn 20:12
I meant to sit with the chair. One thing I had discovered a couple of weeks ago actually have Google Analytics lets you share reports, which is really kind of handy, you can share your custom reports that you’d use to cobble together and things. There’s one that I’ve been using that now maybe we’ll throw it in the show notes, just so that if you can, you can see one of them, which is you know, the effectiveness of marketing sources. Now, this one requires that you have goal setup, and you have you know, numbers tied to those goals. But if you do, it’ll be a fairly useful report for figuring out how any of the content in your site’s performing and and how more important how quickly people are abandoning things and where they’re coming from. So we’ll throw that in the show notes over at marketing over coffee.com. But if you are using Google Custom Reports, are you curious? Actually a good question.
John Wall 20:57
Yeah, we threw it out two weeks ago, right before the holidays. So, you know, nobody’s nobody’s working on their reports over the holidays. So we’ll just refresh that again for another week. That’ll be good. Yeah. Get that guy. Okay, so we had a fun one that I went to throw out there is a tweet from the James Maxwell, two in gadget story about Microsoft exec. Who mentioned that it is possible, it looks like he was talking about possibilities. And of course, he got himself in a little bit of trouble, because he was saying with the Microsoft Kinect, this new video game accessory that actually has a camera and you can just dance around and do things and it works as a controller, your body is the controller. That’s the idea behind this thing. He said it would be possible they could target advertising based on what the camera sees and score. So immediately, we came up with like 20 jokes as far as stuffing, you know, obviously, if your shape is too round, you need the weightwatchers promo to go your way. Whereas if you’re single, they need match on top right if there’s just one person match, that’s the gotta throw that away. So and yeah, and of course it only goes downhill from there to
Christopher Penn 21:59
do to people. certain activities you may certain pharmaceuticals would be recommended
John Wall 22:05
there’s all kinds of ways you can go but so it’s kind of cool the idea of the you know the marketing functions seeing into your home this is the first time I’ve kind of thought about it actually gonna I yeah you know if your house looks like hell you could get the
Unknown Speaker 22:19
merry maids Yeah, that’s right
John Wall 22:21
you know that it just goes on and on. And of course, I don’t know from what it looked like never called the guy got slapped down because the agreement says it will not be used for advertising but I you know, it’s still it was I mean, it’s a valid point that there’s you’re putting an AI in your house yes definitely is Big Brother as it gets, I guess.
Christopher Penn 22:38
I guess if we get one maybe just keep like a little napkin on top of it or something for you know, when you’re not playing when it’s
John Wall 22:43
our case? Yeah, I don’t you know, I was looking at one of those earlier in the year and the thing that got me was that the only games that I thought I would be interested in really poor reviews over at GameSpot. And so I there was nothing that I thought I’d be interested to play. We have a we that goes so unused that we finally brought it to the grandparents and left it there because we just never used the thing. So there’s no point in adding to that pile of unused plastic stuff. All right, well, let’s see. That’s pretty good stack for today. We got some stuff we’ll roll over to next week, upcoming events. What do we got in the road trip? Oh, my God, it’s a
Christopher Penn 23:19
it’s a nearly full calendar, I just got to figure out what all is on. I’m going to be at social fresh Tampa in February. So I’ll be speaking there. On the action. We’ll be talking a bit about the line of sight framework, and also about, you know how email marketing ties into that. So it’ll be that’ll be fun, etc. The educational travel conference, I’ll be speaking at that in February. Then there’s like three other events in February that I’m drawing a blank on right now, because I’m only halfway through this cup of coffee. But it isn’t a lot of travel this year.
John Wall 23:48
All right, that’s cool. We’ve got just finished an interview with Greg rodino, about his book micro marketing. So that’ll probably cover one of your travel spots for early February. Cool. And we’ll see what else we can get going on that front. Yeah, try blog is just company kickoff time for me so that stuff going on for the next two months but should be fun stuff before that. Alright so Question of the week then we’ll go with that. Share with us your best Google Analytics reports that would be good. We’d love to hear what you’ve got going on that front. And with that, I guess we will talk to you next week. Until then enjoy the coffee enjoy the coffee.
Unknown Speaker 24:20
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. You can find Mr. Pan at Blue Sky factory calm and read more at Christopher S Pen calm. Mr. Wall blogs at Roane and marketeer.com and appears regularly on the marketing over coffee theme song is called metallurgy by funk masters. And you can find it at music alley from me vo or follow the link in our show notes