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SlideRocket Set to Blast Into the Online Lead Generation Space
Oct 6th
SlideRocket Set to Blast Into the Online Lead Generation Space
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
SlideRocket is an online presentation editor positioned initially to take on the likes of PowerPoint and Keynote on the web. Today I think it took a giant leap forward.
I’ve always liked SlideRocket’s ease of use for design and find it easier to use than most desktop software. Over the last year or so the tool has continued, in my opinion, to improve by making it easier to add video, use presentations offline, and host online presentations that don’t require any download or plugin on the part of the attendee.
SlideRocket is also a great presentation asset manager because it allows you to share and collaborate on presentations with team members and even updates all your presentations and slides when you make a change to an asset such as a logo. Organizations that share or use common presentations for sales and demos should really appreciate that functionality.
This week SlideRocket announced additional features that also make it a powerful sales and lead generation tool.
SlideRocket users can now embed live collaborative comments as well as polls and surveys into presentations and have these presentations available 24/7 as marketing assets.
Viewers can add comments, like sticky notes, anywhere in a presentation and have the comments delivered to the presentation author in real time organized in one place.
While other online meeting tools such as GoToWebinar and WebEx use polling and surveys, what makes SlideRocket’s implementation different is the ability to create and host interactive presentations that can be viewed at any time and then get real time alerts as people add comments and complete survey data.
For the small business this is almost like having your best sales person standing by making presentations, qualifying, nurturing, and perhaps even closing leads day and night.
As you can see I’m pretty bullish on this update because I think this could be a game changer in the world of small business lead generation.
Imagine running a PPC or offline ad campaign that sends people to a landing page to view your educational presentation featuring, slides, data, audio, video, surveying and polling and knowing in real time who is viewing the presentation, how they are responding, where they spending the most time or where they stop viewing.
There are other providers of real time lead analytics, but few compare to Slide Rocket’s ease of use and ability to engage.
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MediaVest Hires Sarah Baehr, Former Media Lead at Razorfish
Oct 5th
| He has written extensively about social media, search marketing, video advertising, and Internet policy, and is a frequent moderator at industry events. |
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Can Twitter Lead People to the Streets? – Room for Debate
Sep 30th
| In The New Yorker this week, Malcolm Gladwell offers a bracing critique of the notion that social media like Twitter and Facebook… |
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Needs don’t always lead to demand
Sep 29th
One of the accepted holy grails of building an organization is that you should fill a need. Fill people’s needs, they say, and the rest will take care of itself.
But… someone might know that they need to lose some weight, but what they demand is potato chips.
Someone might know that they need to be more concerned about the world, but what they demand is another fake reality show.
As my friend Tricia taught me, this is brought into sharp relief when doing social enterprise in the developing world. There are things that people vitally need… and yet providing it is no guarantee you’ll find demand.
Please don’t tell get confused by what the market needs. That’s something you decided, not them.
If you want to help people lose weight, you need to sell them something they demand, like belonging or convenience, not lecture them about what they need.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Social conservatives lead the Tea Party
Sep 27th
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Call social conservatives tea partiers, radical right-wingers, Republicans, fundamentalists, libertarians, or independents. |
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Why China-Japan Spat Won’t Lead to War
Sep 13th
Last Tuesday, a Chinese fishing boat collided with Japanese coast guard boats near the tiny Diaoyutai Islands (as they’re known to Taiwan. China calls them the Diaoyu. Japan calls them the Senkaku. All three countries claim them as their own.)
Japan took the captain and crew of the fishing boat hostage. It released the crew today, but the captain and boat remain in custody, pending a Japanese investigation. The arrests underline an ongoing power struggle between the two Asian superpowers, with China increasingly on the offensive. But, according to the Global Post’s Jonathan Adams, China and Japan are too economically interdependent to risk a full-scale conflict:
Nearby natural gas resources (Ed.: and potential oil reserves) make the islets’ location strategic…Japan has had greatest effective control…But China’s strong reaction to the latest incident reflects a newfound swagger, as the rising Asian power seeks to enforce a range of territorial claims, said Asia security expert and longtime China-watcher Willy Lam.
China has one of the world’s most rapidly modernizing navies and also Asia’s largest sea force, including more than 60 attack submarines and 75 destroyers and frigates, according to the Pentagon. And it’s got an aircraft carrier in the works. Japan has just 18 submarines — a number set to expand in response to the Chinese navy’s rise — and about 50 destroyers and frigates.
But a serious military showdown is unlikely, for many reasons. Perhaps the most important is the unprecedented economic ties between East Asia’s two big powers. In 2007, China surpassed the U.S. as Japan’s top economic partner. Since then, the two countries haven’t looked back: Two-way trade hit a record of nearly $140 billion in the first half of this year, a 34.5 percent jump from the same period last year, according to Japanese government figures. Japan’s exports to China are rising even faster than its imports, due to rising Chinese consumption that shows China’s increased importance as a market, not just the world’s factory.
All of which suggests that Japan has a strong interest in resolving the current spat quickly, and, to the extent possible, to Beijing’s satisfaction.
Adams also suggests that “China’s emergence as a fishing superpower” played a part in the country’s strong reaction to Japan’s arrests. Chinese fishing boats catch 17 million tons of fish a year, according to Adams, far more than the US or Japan. China’s roughly 300,000 motorized boats “have been involved in disputes with the U.S. Navy, the Indonesian coast guard and now Japan,” writes Adams.
The increased chest-thumping reflects China’s growing role as an East Asian hegemon, in case we needed more proof of that. Read the rest of the Global Post article here.
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Lead the Online Marketing Industry With Successful Article Writing Services
Sep 9th
| About the Company: Seocontentwriters, is an extension of BrainPulse Technologies, an eminent Internet Marketing Company. |
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3-D, Price Hikes Lead to Drop in Cinema Sales
Sep 1st
Image: eye of einstein/Flickr
The cinema was one of the Great Depression era’s most popular escapes. Today’s Great Recession, however, is seeing fewer cinema visitors. The reason? An increase in the price of the average movie ticket. The BBC has the story:
Box office receipts in the US rose by $100m (£64.9m) this summer, despite the lowest attendance in five years, figures have shown. Movie website Hollywood.com said the actual number of tickets sold was expected to be 552m – the lowest since 2005, when the figure was 563.2m.
The drop in attendance is thought to be due to a steep rise in ticket prices, mainly for 3D screenings. The cost of an average US cinema ticket rose by 5% over the last 12 months, according to The National Association of Theatre Owners.
Cinema-goers now pay an average of $7.88 (£5.10) per ticket, a rise of 38 cents (25 pence) from 2009.
Box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian said the higher revenue was a “shallow victory”. He added: “You want to see attendance go up every year, not down.”
According to WiseGeek:
A survey conducted by the American Association of Retired People show that 40% of seniors no longer attend films because they can no longer afford the prices. The average non-matinee movie ticket now costs about 10 US dollars (USD). Popcorn costs about six USD, and a drink, about four USD. Thus, the average expense at a theater is about 20 USD. For a family of four, that’s approximately 80 USD for two hours of entertainment.
A sixteen year old making minimum wage must work nearly four hours to afford seeing a film and purchasing concession items. Movie tickets for a poorer family might be 10% of a family’s weekly income. To an increasing number of people, movie tickets are now too high a price to pay for entertainment, especially when film rental is significantly less expensive.
Marginal Revolution describes questions the economics of the film industry:
(In the film industry,) the cost of manufacturing the product has no affect on the purchase cost to the consumer. For example Honda can make a cheaper car with less features and cheaper finishes than BMW without losing all of their customers to the superior car because they sell their product for less. You spend less to make something, you charge less for it. Makes complete and obvious sense. Not so in the film business.
I am an independent film producer and I make films that typically cost somewhere between $5M and $10M. But when I make, say, an $8M film it has to compete at the same price level as the studios’ $80M or $100M film. It costs the consumer the same $12 at the multiplex (and whatever it costs to rent a DVD from Blockbuster these days) for either film. There is no price advantage to the consumer for choosing to see a less expensive film. This naturally makes it terribly difficult for smaller films to find an audience. I find this quite fascinating and I can’t readily think of another industry like it.
A few years ago Edgar Bronfman Jr, during the time his family briefly owned the Universal film studio, suggested that theaters actually charge different admission prices for different pictures so those films that cost less to make had correspondingly lower ticket prices than the mega-budget studio pictures. He was roundly ridiculed by the industry. But truth be told I actually think the less-the-warm reception his proposal received had more to do with the fact he was an ‘outsider’ who had bought his way into Hollywood than on the actual merit of the idea itself. Sound like good economic practice to me.
Paying actors less than, say, $1 million per movie wouldn’t hurt, either. The Movie Blog has an excellent explanation of where your $10 goes when you pay for a movie.
View full post on Business Pundit
How to Automate a Lead Engagement System
Aug 24th
How to Automate a Lead Engagement System
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Technology has allowed us to move past the days when we simply drove a prospect to our website, captured their name and email address, and started them in a drip system in hopes that at some point they would click on a link in one of our emails and buy something.
Today’s lead generation system is a fully automated lead engagement system aimed at delivering the right information to the right person at the right time – and helping the sales team spot the perfect prospects ready for further engagement. By chaining together a series of web based applications you can create a system that engages, analyzes, and even gets pretty close to thinking about how to create better leads.
Below is an example of how a system like this might flow
- Run a series of ads using Adwords and Facebook promoting a free downloadable eBook
- Create seriously interactive and user friendly landing page forms with wufoo
- Automatically test two versions of landing pages using a landing page tool like Unbounce or Google website Optimizer
- Landing page success page includes Audio Acrobat audio recorded instructions on what to expect next
- When prospect requests copy of free eBook Solve 360 CRM creates a record and sends email to Flowtown
- Flowtown analyzes the social media activity associated with email and appends CRM record with social media data
- Based on social media activity criteria Flowtown creates influencer alerts and tags records for segmentation
- Segmentation information is sent to Constant Contact to enroll prospect in one of a series of email follow-up campaigns based on social media participation
- Email series invites prospects back to a series of video landing pages using personalized URL technology from SendPepper that also creates a post card mailing with personalized data from the campaign
- When a SendPepper pURL landing page is visited the Solve 360 CRM creates a task and the appropriate sales person receives a mobile alert to call the prospect
A system like this can be created by any size small business and gives you the kind of fire power that would make a salesperson at a Fortune 100 company giddy – as long as you also monitor every aspect using a tool like Google Analytics to help improve conversion at every step.
The entire process can be designed, monitored and tuned in such a way that it feels appropriate and elegant for each prospect that experiences it. While few things will ever replace person to person contact in the world of engagement a well designed lead engagement system is the front line tool that can help you create the know, like, and trust required to get that all important first meeting.
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Small Business News: Let The Ladies Lead
Aug 7th
Small business success knows no gender to be sure, but the field has also had no shortage of women leaders in recent years. One of the best platforms around for receiving the regular doses of wisdom these thought leaders and others dole out is Twitter, a social platform that allows users to speak directly to their followers, folks who have deliberately chosen to be regularly updated on what they have to say. In the last few years a lot of lists have circulated about the best women small business leaders to follow. We’re thrilled to see that our own Anita Campbell, founder of Small Business Trends (@Smallbiztrends) appears on five of the six lists below.
Small Biz Women To Follow
Best branded women: The top 20. Of course, personal brand is one of the best reasons to use social media, and Kris Ruby’s article deals with those women who arguably do it best, not just to draw attention to themselves but as a way of raising the profile for their businesses online and beyond. Forbes.com
100 women to follow. This is a truly gigantic list, in this case of the most “powerful” women on Twitter based on “Twitter grade” and including such factors as number of followers and number of updates. Is this the right way to measure power? You decide, but they are probably still worth the follow TwitterGrader.com
20 women entrepreneurs should follow. From self-made millionaire Ali Brown to speaker and marketer Aliza Sherman and many more. These are the women entrepreneurs should following, according to entrepreneur and adventurer Natalie Sisson, who lists some of the women who have inspired her most in her life, from the information they provide to their support for entrepreneurship. She hopes you find them inspiring too. Work In Progress
Everybody’s got their own pick. Here’s Melinda Emerson a.k.a. “SmallBizLady” with her own curated list of 25 women she follows on Twitter and thinks you should too. These are the women Emerson says handle business in a way she respects and admires. How about you? Who are your favorites? Building Your Business
30 women to follow on Twitter. Entrepreneur Natalie MacNeil handpicks these 30 women to follow on Twitter but admits there may be more and hopes others will share their point of view. Natalie says she is always seeking business women to follow and learn from. This is her list of top inspirations. Forbes Woman
Dianna Huff shares her picks of 25 very smart women to follow on Twitter. Dianna’s list includes the Twitter accounts of leaders like Anne Holland, Sandy Carter, Stephanie Tilton and Jamie Wallace. There are an additional 10 bonus names added at the bottom of the list so don’t stop after you’ve checked out the first 25 promised in the title. B2B Marcom Writer Blog
Biz News
Another inspiring woman in small business. Many in the small business community are familiar with Denise O’Berry who will be the guest blogger at SCORE “Counselors to America’s Small Business” for the month of August so drop by and see Denise’s posts regularly on the Website and enjoy her small business advice and tips. SCORE Women’s Success Blog
Google Small Biz Initiative
Google has a new small business blog. You may be wondering, what took them so long? After all, the online search leader has created many tools that make it easier for small business to compete online. So, really a small business blog would seem a logical step. Finally, the wait is over. Google Enterprise Blog
Google visits Boise. So, why would search engine giant Google travel to Boise, Idaho, of all places and publicize the trip on the second post of its brand new small business blog. Well, would you believe Boise is one of the fastest growing small business communities in the nation with an estimated $72 million in revenue from Google online advertising tools for Idaho small businesses in 2009? Google Small Business Blog
Road To Success
Hotel chain offers small business room at the inn. Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott will be giving 10 U.S. small business owners 15 free nights of accommadations each allowing them to travel across the country building their business in this unique contest with a $20,000 cash prize for the winner. For more details, visit the link above. And good luck to the winners. Duct Tape Marketing
Small Business News: Let The Ladies Lead
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