HubSpot and Watershed Publishing recently released their Marketing Data Box, a “quarterly collection of practical marketing tools ready for professional use.”

The free collection of 65 charts from information wizards MarketingCharts collects current data from The Neilsen Company, Harris Interactive, Pew Research, Kantar Media, Compete, comScore, Experian Hitwise and Mediaguide. It aims to provide marketers, social media and SEO experts, and just about anyone else with all the ammunition they need for presentations, blog posts and general insight into online trends across a multitude of platforms and channels.

The collection can be downloaded in either PDF or PowerPoint format (or both), and is the latest in the slew of reports, whitepapers, and other resources HubSpot has made available at no charge.

This treasure trove of information is cleanly presented and well organized, making it easy to find the answer to almost any question business professionals may have about the current marketing climate. It focuses heavily on digital, but also includes other relevant statistics from retail/consumer goods and lifestyle/community. It could easily be retitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Marketing But Were Afraid to Ask.” Or perhaps “Everything You’d Better Be Thinking About In Marketing.”

Not only is this package an invaluable research tool for market intelligence, as content producers it’s also a great resource for idea generation. If all the topics explored don’t spark a wildfire of ideas, there’s a problem between keyboard and chair.

I find myself in the position of giving more and more lectures and speeches at conferences and other gatherings. I also teach a college course in web marketing. In both settings, these free-to-use charts are proving to be a tremendous resource for backing up my points with real data.

Download this package immediately, and prepare to have your mind expanded.

This week’s tip is for those of you struggling to manage your brand’s social media efforts on a daily basis, and finding that the work is time consuming, and monotonous. The solution is simple, “think campaign.”

In order to see the true benefits from managing your brand’s social media pages is treat it like any other marketing or public relations campaign. Start with research and planning. Learn where your targeted publics are located, and how they are using social media. Use that knowledge to create your plan.

Next, implement your strategy and measure along the way. Follow the strategy you set forth, but don’t be afraid to change directions when needed. Stick to your brand’s voice, but don’t be afraid to change your content strategy if you’re not getting the engagement or reach you’re looking for.

Once you’re into a solid strategy you’ll find that scheduling content in advance becomes easier, and if you’re campaign is done well, you’ll begin engaging with customers in an organized fashion that’s never been possible in the past.

If you’re current social media strategy is to turn on your computer and do a few posts each day, then it’s time to start focusing on developing a plan that looks out more well into your future rather than the next 24 hours.

REVIEW:

1. Research
2. Develop A Plan
3. Implement Your Strategy
4. Stick to Your Brand’s Voice
5. Don’t Be Afraid to Change
6. Measure

Upon a recommendation from our CEO, as well as its location on my “books I really need to read” list has lead to me to Sun-tzu’s “Art of War” — it’s free to download on iBooks, and while I’m not finished yet, it is something I recommend everyone read.

I explain this as I toss in this quote to introduce Mr. Matt Chandler, our Vice President of Advancement.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”

Sun-tzu – Chinese general & military strategist (~400 BC)

This is as true in business as it is in war, and it is as true to marketing online as it is to traditional business. Mr. Chandler’s role on our team is to make sure our team and clients have the knowledge to ensure that we are always moving forward, always advancing.

Without further ado, here are five questions with Matt Chandler, Vice President of Advancement for Raidious.

Who are you, where did you come from?

My name is Matt Chandler, and I was born right here in Indianapolis. According to my parents and old family friends, I started talking at five months of age and haven’t stopped since.

I studied elementary education in college, and fell into internet work along the way. I’ve worked for Community Health Network, hosted a late-night free-form radio show, and was an independent concert promoter.

I lived in Brooklyn, NY, for three-and-a-half years and worked as a web manager for NYU Langone Medical Center. After joining Raidious I moved back to Indianapolis in early 2010. I also teach a college class in Web Marketing at the Art Institute of Indianapolis.

I was a music writer for Nuvo Newsweekly and IndianapolisMusic.net, and I’m a featured guest blogger for Marketing Tech Blog, Social Media Today and My Venture Pad.

What is Advancement?

Advancement is literally the act of moving forward. I’ve always found progress to be better than doing nothing, or even worse, moving backward.

In the business sense, advancement takes a number of forms. I help our clients learn how to work with Raidious, getting them familiar with our processes and platforms, so they can make the most of their relationship with us.

I also help clients learn some of the philosophies and tools of internet marketing, in the form of SocializeU, the training program I created. It includes everything from the nuts-and-bolts of writing for various web platforms to planning and execution of crisis communications.

Advancement is also a process that’s internal to Raidious, in which I quickly onboard new employees and educate them in best practices and the Raidious model. This ensures that every person who works for us produces the best quality work in ways that adhere to our philosophy.

It all boils down to what I call going from strangers to intimates. Along the path from first meeting a potential client to a contracted working relationship, we pass through several steps. At first we are strangers, and through both reactive and proactive means we become acquaintances. As we relate and empathize with each other, we identify business needs and motives, and explore ways to become partners. We then work together to brainstorm solutions and prioritize needs, reaching a deep level of understanding to become intimate.

This process of moving from strangers to intimates is crucial to doing the best work we can for our clients, and is the essence of advancement. It’s the same with clients, with new employees, and even in our personal relationships. Advancement raises the level of analysis from “Who are you?” to “How can we help each other?”

What are you most excited about for 2011?

I’m just excited to see where this business can go. From the beginning to where we are now, we’ve advanced beyond our wildest expectations. We always knew what we were capable of, it was just a matter of demonstrating that to companies.

Now the team has expanded, we’re working with some of the greatest brands in the world, and things only seem to be getting bigger and better every day. I’m proud to be a part of helping form this company, playing an active role in plotting our course. I always say my worst day at Raidious is better than my best day working anywhere else.

We’ve beaten the odds at this point: we’ve survived and thrived as a start-up business. And we’ve done it the way we know is right, under the guidance and examples set by our President and CEO, Taulbee Jackson. This year should prove to be challenging and fun, and I’m just glad to be a part of it.

Why should brands work with Raidious?

Working with Raidious is different than working with anyone else. We develop true relationships with our clients, based on mutual understanding and respect. We are impeccable with our word, delivering exactly what we say we will and beyond.

Every member of our team has a wide range of experience and interests, so we’re able to bring a unique creativity to the process. We’ve all spent a great deal of time working in large organizations, many of which are mired in the traditional ways of conducting business, trying to shoehorn those ideas into the online world. Raidious was formed in part to take only the best of those ideas and reshape them into something totally new and different.

Everything we do is designed for one result: making our clients look good. Obviously we want them to sell more products along the way. But we can turn every single interaction, every piece of content we produce into meaningful, measurable results that translate into dollars. They can justify the financial and human resource budget they spend with us because we tangibly demonstrate the return.

Plus, what we do is hard. Most companies don’t have the experience, the expertise, or the human resource capital available to constantly monitor and moderate what’s being said about them online. They are focused on doing the work that they do, not talking about that work. Who wouldn’t want a team of detail-obsessed workaholics who are dedicated to telling the world how great your brand is working for them?

How can someone jump start their content in a large organization if they don’t have the budget?

You’re either on the bus or off the bus. Saying you’re going to do a little social media or try to produce some content–video, blog, whatever–is like partial nuclear disarmament. You have weapons or you don’t. You’re producing content or you’re not. Adding the task of blogging and tweeting and whatnot to the secretary’s list of things to do isn’t going to cut it.

That being said, there are ways companies can start small and keep things manageable. It requires a commitment from all levels of leadership and management, and expectations have to be reasonable. You only get out of it what you put into it.

If a company truly doesn’t have the resources to engage in a full-on content campaign, at minimum they should have a website that is current and well designed. Make sure it’s search optimized and intuitive. Concentrate on what you want site visitors to do: the call to action. It should be easy for visitors to figure out how to go about buying your products. If they have to guess, they’ll move on to someone else.

Is there one person on your staff who can dedicate a few hours a week to social media? Have them sit down for 15 minutes with every senior leader and every manager and ask them a few questions about the company: its past, its priorities, its plans. Turn that into one 300-word blog post per week. You now have a store of constantly fresh content that will help your search rankings and provide unique, transparent insights to potential customers.

That same person could spend a little time at least setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter profile. A couple of posts per day on those platforms about the company’s activities, some active conversation with followers and fans, and you’ve got a least a minimal presence on the two most crucial social media platforms.

Of course, there’s much more brands could and should be doing. But at the very least having some sort of presence on those owned media platforms–a presence that is updated somewhat regularly and not set up and left to rot–is better than doing absolutely nothing. It’s what today’s customers want and expect, and you’d better be willing to deliver.

This week’s tip is quick and simple. Metrics.

If you are going to use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to market your business then you must be able to measure your success on those platforms.

With baseball season about to kick off this week, all I seem to be able to think about is numbers. If you’re a die-hard baseball fan, then you know what I mean. We are constantly thinking about numbers, and measuring the success of our team based on those numbers.

We are below .500, but why? We look at Earned Run Average (ERA), Batting Average (BA), On Base Percentage (OBP), Home Runs (HR), Slugging (SLG), On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS), etc.

In measuring social media, we have statistics like Likes, Recommendations, Retweets, Replies, Backlinks, and so on.

Measuring the success of your social media strategy easy when you have the right tools, and it’s vital to know what you need to do moving forward. Therefore my new catch phrase has become, “You can’t know what to say until you start listening.”

If you’re in marketing, odds are good that this week’s issue of Ad Age is sitting on your desk, in your briefcase, or in your mailbox. It’s the annual Digital Issue, a special (and  widely-read) edition of Ad Age, focusing exclusively on the fast-moving world we live in every day, known as interactive / digital / web / online marketing.

Raidious put a special message in this year’s Ad Age Digital Issue: just a little reminder for all you CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Social Media Managers, eMarketing Managers, and other digital marketing junkies. Turn to page six please. Then contact us!

Got a great email from eMarketer this morning on one of our favorite topics:

Blending Paid, Owned and Earned Media for Branding from eMarketer.

The first concept: Owned Media. It does a really good job of explaining the difference between earned media (what ad agencies do), paid media (what PR firms do) and owned media (what Raidious does). I wrote a post on this last year, and Forrester Research has covered the subject as well.

There were a couple of other topics the eMarketer research addressed as well that are important concepts. These seem to come up regularly in “shop talk” around the office.

The second concept is the concept of paying your marketing firm to accomplish an objective, rather than paying for production deliverables, like an ad or a press release. This is how we price our services at Raidious (we call them “initiatives”, not to be confused with “campaigns”). We think it’s an idea whose time has come.

The last concept is something we run into regularly (really two concepts) – direct response vs. brand oriented mindsets on the client side.

In our experience, the client-side marketing universe is divided into two camps, neither of which really understand the other very well: The Direct Marketer, usually an eCommerce / lead-driven mindset, and The Brand Marketer, someone who is more focused on what some people would call “soft” metrics, like preference, awareness, and other measurements of hearts and minds.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

We take a lot of pride in our understanding of both approaches, and our ability to deliver on objectives from either side of the equation. But, if a genie granted me three wishes, the first would be for world peace, the second for an Audi A8, and the third would be for client side marketers to reconcile these seemingly opposing points of view. They’re both valid, and valuable approaches, but as the eMarketer article points out, they work best when they work together.

Come back and visit our site in the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring all of these ideas. In the mean time, if you’d like to talk to a firm that can help with all of this (owned media, objective driven marketing, direct and brand approaches) . . . give us a call!

Okay, so the concept is a little meta, but Thomson Reuters hosted a webinar called “How to Use Content-Based Webinars to Generate Leads and ROI,” which I attended last Friday afternoon.

Guest speakers were Cameron Brown, President and Founder of King Fish Media, and Lisa Tanen-La Fontaine, Director of Marketing Management for Prudential Retirement.

First of all, it was interesting to see a live webinar with such high production values. Thomson Reuters carries all their video events from a real studio located in Times Square. This was my first time participating in one of their programs, so I was a bit taken aback at the quality.

But on to the important part: as always, content ruled the day.

The single biggest bombshell for most folks was probably the statistics from research conducted by King Fish Media. In their 2009 study on marketing, media and measurement, 74% of companies surveyed stated that based on their current experience, creating their own original content and media is the most effective means for generating marketing return on investment (ROI).

That bears repeating:

74% of companies said that creating their own original content and media is the most effective means for generating marketing ROI.

Now look at the pretty picture:

Courtesy King Fish Media

Now look at what you’re doing. The companies in the survey are shifting their overall marketing priority to a self-published model, and have demonstrated that model is making them money. Do they know something you don’t? Are they doing something you’re not?

The whole notion is based on the concept of owned media. Paid media (advertising) and earned media (articles written from press releases) still exist and can be used effectively, but owned media–self-generated content–provides the greatest opportunity to invite people in rather than speak at them. This level of interaction is de rigeur in today’s media climate, and people expect credible content and interaction rather than one big sales pitch.

Owned media also provides the greatest flexibility in media consumption.

By owning your content, you can repurpose and redistribute it across as many channels as you see fit. You can update it as conditions change and new information becomes available. In other words, unlike ephemeral press coverage or a fixed media buy, owned media can last forever.

Another salient point from the discussion was customer awareness of the “empty ask:” when companies ask for their opinions, feedback or questions, people are generally savvy enough to recognize when the company is patronizing them, not actually wanting to hear the answer or follow up. The solution here is to ask and mean it; commit to following up.

Finally, the speakers emphasized the importance of making it as easy as possible for the user or customer to take action. No matter what media or channel you’re using, always make a call to action available and obvious so that you move from education or information dissemination to action. Whether the action is the sale or a request for more information, you’ve transitioned the user from a passive observer to a customer. They are now on your list; they’re a warm lead that’s worth money.

I highly suggest checking out the Thomson Reuters Best Practice webinar series. They’re free and highly informative and useful.

Fan pages are all the rage today for businesses both large and small. My experience has been that personal pages can be just as powerful, and even more so in most cases. The key is finding a balance between your personal life and your business life with your online presence.

Sales people and entrepreneurs have an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal in a platform like Facebook. You can connect to hundreds or even thousands of potential customers, and even make those people active advocates for your cause … if you know how to communicate to them.

You see, people love dogs and kids. Photos of little Sally and Fido playing in the back yard are great for drawing friends, family, and acquaintances to your page, but that’s not going to do much for your business. Following that post up with a post about your new latest and greatest company news can lead to something more profitable.

Balance is the most important part of social media marketing. Everyone hates the sales guy who follows you around the showroom floor. Do not become that guy online.

It says it all right there in the first word, “social” media. In order to communicate effectively, and build relationships online, you have to be social. No one likes the guy that talks shop 24/7.

In order to keep your audience interested, find a balance between your personal content, and promoting your business online.

As a function of our partnership with email marketing solutions provider ExactTarget, we’ve been in attendance at the 2010 Partner Summit.

Panel Discussion at ExactTarget Partner Summit 2010

I was only able to attend day two, as I was finishing up some critical work in the office on the first day. But day two had some outstanding sessions and a lot of opportunities to meet and talk with some of the smartest people around.

The highlight for me was the “Best Practices in Building a Professional Service Practice” discussion panel, which featured bright minds like Scott Rhodes of Razorfish and Chris Thornton of Definition 6 among others. The discussion touched on many of the pains and struggles we’re dealing with in growing a small company into an enterprise-level agency.

Morgan Stewart, Director of Research and Strategy at ExactTarget, also gave a great talk about the strengths and weaknesses of various digital communication platforms, either alone or in concert. He presented some good research highlights to illustrate his points.

At the risk of getting a crick in my neck from patting my own back, his session was all old hat to me. It seems like we read the same research and articles. But for many of their smaller business partners I’m sure there was some revelatory information.

As with any conference, it’s not all talking heads and poster sessions. It’s also about some good networking parties, and ExactTarget definitely scored high marks. The day one evening event (which I was able to attend) was a swanky affair at Andretti Autosport. Great food, open bar, and open access to actual race cars. I even introduced myself to Michael Andretti. Great stuff.

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This vendor is solving a problem--no sunglasses. (Image via Wikipedia)

The problem with digital marketing is that of itself it doesn’t solve anything. Without proper planning and identifying goals and objectives, digital marketing is just burning money.

The solution isn’t “We need to be on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.” The solution starts with identifying the business problem you need to solve. A business problem is a living, breathing entity with a mind all its own, and your desired outcome is dependent upon the perceptions and habits of real human beings. As such, problems need to be treated as unique individuals.

• Do you need to own organic search for your vertical?
• Do you need to manage negative sentiment?
• Do you need to increase conversions?

All these come down to winning hearts and minds, but the approaches and platforms required by each are quite different. Without proper strategic planning you’re herding cats.

Ask the best salesperson you know, and they’ll tell you when they really started making money was the day they stopped selling and started helping people solve problems.

Problem solving sounds like a lot of work, and it is. But there are some simple principles you can employ as you develop your strategy that can help.

First, ask yourself if the problem you’ve identified is the right problem to solve. You may look at your e-commerce website’s lackluster conversion numbers and decide that the problem is with your pricing. But before you set about cost-cutting measures to drive down prices, start by looking at the website itself. Is there a clear, prominent call to action like a big “Buy Now!” button? The problem you need to address may be with the site’s user interface.

Second, consider the opportunities that are created by the problem. In the above example, one step you may take to correct the problematic UI is to look more closely at your site analytics. In delving more deeply into these numbers than the mere number of site visits and bounce rate, you may discover a vital demographic or source of traffic of which you were previously unaware. So solving the sales problem may open up new marketing doors.

Above all, stay positive. Digital marketing is ever-evolving. Just as your newly-launched website is never really finished, your marketing priorities continue shift and adjust as you learn more and more about your business and its place in the world.