Justin Dawkins

Updates from March, 2008

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  Social Networking Sites Killing Email?

  Justin 7:04 pm on March 16, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Email Marketing (7), Social Media (3), Social Networking

  Ok ESPs, inbox providers and ISPs, relax. Email is just fine, I just wanted to get your attention, but you should still pay close attention to the question. Here’s an excerpt captured from a recent article I read;

  For the first time last month, traffic to social networks overtook traffic to web-based email services in the UK. Top networks Facebook, Bebo and MySpace took 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, with only 4.98% going to email services including Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

  If you pay close attention you will see that this took place in the UK, where email already gives way to SMS, but I have to wonder whether we will see a similar trend in the US. If so, then the first question I have to ask is; How will this shift in communication preference influence eMarketers that use email as a primary point of communication?

  Another reason this is particularly interesting, to me, is because I previously wrote a post about how social networks started with email. In that article I made mention to the fact that social networks, were a mashup of web 1.0 technologies, that simply faded away in late last century. This, recent, statistical observation reiterates my point, and raise another very big question; are social networks just the evolution of email, or the Texas sized asteriod that will crash into the Planet Email and kill the now pre-historic communication medium? Ok, i’ll admit it’s a bit dramatic, especially considering email is still a baby compared to other forms of communication. Nonetheless, as technology evolves you have to wonder, does the exponential growth rate of technology mean that we will see the product life cycle of internet technologies become shorter? Or does it simply mean that the product evolution cycle will become more and more obvious. I’m not sure, but there is plenty of room to imagine where this is all going. Just something to think about. What do you think?

 

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  At 30,000 Feet: Set your own benchmarks

  Justin 1:48 pm on January 2, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Measurement (2)

  As you begin your new year, you have probably spent a very large amount of time on planning your online marketing mix. You have started to look at new technologies and maybe even new ways to showcase and inform people about your product or business. Well I just want to share a bit of advise about benchmarks from 30,000 feet (A High Level Perspective).

  While planning your goals and setting your measures of success late last year, you may have taken a look at some of the many industry reports that are available. You may have even started to look at the performance of your marketing tools and began to compare your stats to the those found in industry analysis reports. Before you get too deep in to the year may I recommend that you take a minute to review your current plan and look to set benchmarks based off your own data, instead of published benchmarks. I believe it to be a very good practice to set your own benchmarks and measure your success off of the milestones you set for your emarketing programs. Industry standards, or benchmarks, may be a good place to start for measuring the success of your marketing or business plan, however there is one important variable many reports leave out. Your business.

  Like I briefly mentioned before, industry benchmarks are essentially averages or the summation of data acquired and manipulated by someone outside of your organization. Sometimes the formulas they use, don’t take into account the variables your business model experiences or plans for. Industry benchmarks are important because it can give you a snapshot of the various marketing tools and how they perform across the marketing industry, but your business should really be measured on your own performance metrics and at your organization’s own pace. Let’s take email marketing for example. The open and click-through rates, detailed in a email marketing benchmark report, are aggregates and averages across various business models and sometimes business verticals. This can lead to a very skewed perspective and may even lead to beign misinformed about your customers’ preferences or behaviors. Instead of comparing your open rates on generalized standards, try monitoring and observing your own opens and clicks based off of metrics you define. By doing this, you can included variables that are likely left out of the industry benchmarks. Things like; seasonality, subject lines, dynamic content, communication preferences, personalization etc. If you measure from, quarter to quarter, month to month, or even campaign to campaign, you will undoubtedly find out more about your marketing performance and customers, than any benchmark will supply. This may seem like a regular practice to some, and foreign to others, but try it out if you haven’t before. Taking baby steps to improve your email marketing click-through rates or changing the links structure on your website for SEO, may take a little more time than you would like, but doing so will give you greater visibility into understanding your audience, even at 30,000 feet.

 
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  Social Networking started with email

  Justin 2:46 am on November 3, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Email Marketing (7), Internet Marketing (6), Social Media (3)

  Absurd. Right? Well, I recently jotted down some of the reasons I originally started to use email and compared it to the reasons I joined a few social networks. I soon discovered that the fundamental reasons I use social networks, is very similar to the original reasons I use email.

  Before social networks, people would share their photos, interest, and information through email, and before that… well let’s not go there. Online photo galleries would soon give people the ability to share photos and experiences with family member and friends and on many occasions the world, extending the amount of people a person could touch with just a few extra clicks of a mouse. Next came personal websites and the concept of a guestbook. Remember those? A guestbook would allow people people to enter their email address, web address, or name and leave a message on your page(Today we call it a wall). These messages, though now visible to anyone, look very similar to basic conversation style emails you would receive from a friend or colleague. Today social network users have; an inbox, where they can carry a dialog through one-to-one messaging, a photo gallery where people can tag, comment and exchange experiences, a wall where people call publicly post comments and more.

  I know that this observation is vague, but if you really take a step back and think about the nature of a social network you may realize that it is basically, and I stress the simplicity, the connection of; email, photo galleries, and personal websites with guestbooks. Of course with the addition of widgets, videos, and broadband connections, sharing information, photos and one’s digital-self has becomes easier, and faster, than ever before, but even with the progressive nature of the internet, the fundamental reason to use a social network stems from the same reasons people originally use email. Again I stress the fact that this observation seems fairly simple, and doesn’t take into account the sophisticated nature of a social networks today, but you really have to ask yourself. Is the social network one of the internet’s first Mashups? Just something to think about.

  -Justin D.