Great Clients: Born or Made?

July 22, 2010 by anthonyima

Having spent more than a decade interacting with clients in an agency capacity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazing clients.  Of course, there wouldn’t be great clients without some bad ones along the way. Agencies often joke about how bad clients can be.  As you’d suspect, there are even some funny videos on YouTube about the trials and tribulations of the agency-client relationship.

It is all too easy to become frustrated by clients when you are in the agency space. But as time goes by and the tread wears a bit on the old tires, I think it’s healthy to look at the relationship from a different perspective.

The recent acquisition of a new client motivated this article.  I consider myself fortunate to have won the confidence of this new client and would definitely put them in the “Amazing” category. They are fair, open when sharing information, conduct themselves as true professionals, and most of all, they take pride in their culture as the best in their industry.

This culture is more than just words. It manifests itself in their attitudes and actions. In a recent meeting, they were kind enough to compliment the entire IMA team on our work ethic, honesty, integrity and our commitment to building a partnership. Naturally, coming from this particular client, I took this as high praise.

Basking in their praise started me thinking about what we did right to earn the compliment. As I evaluate the events that occurred over the past year in our pursuit of this client, I realize that  three factors in particular that directly attributed to our now solid relationship.

The first was our patience. Clients don’t want to be pressured for their business. It’s my opinion that this is arguably the most critical aspect of the relationship. I’ve yet to meet a client that really cares about an agency’s sales quota, goals or business objectives. When we let the pressures of our own business influence how we handle prospective clients, it often boomerangs, souring the relationship before it ever gets started. It serves those of us in the agency space to remember that  it is about them! We can’t let our own business challenges get in the way of doing the right thing for our clients. Thankfully, in this case, we didn’t.

The second factor was our willingness to share information, ideas and intellectual property. From the very beginning of the sales process we acted as if our prospect was already our client. Everything we did and said was in their best interest.  We were honest and generous with our guidance – even at the risk of losing the business. Because we never just told them what they wanted to hear, they gained insight into who we are, how we think and what it would be like to work with us. In many ways, a good client relationship has to be a love match similar to finding the right person in your life. The client has to love you for who you really are, which includes your faults as well as your strengths.  We’ve seen clients make bad choices in  selecting their business partners. But this is never just the client’s fault. There are agencies that don’t represent themselves honestly, who say what the client wants to hear just to win the business. Eventually, however, this approach will backfire on both partners.

Because finally, integrity must be at the core of everything you do. This is not as prevalent as it should be in the agency space.  We can’t expect clients to behave with integrity if we don’t first set the example. Promising more than you can deliver or misrepresenting yourself at any point in the relationship will have a negative short- and long-term impact. Why is it so hard for people to openly discuss their shortcomings? Have we forgotten that clients are people just like us who can appreciate the challenges we all face? It is human nature to be sympathetic to those who acknowledge their demons just as long as they see you working toward a better outcome. Whenever I’ve done this with clients, it has always been received positively. In fact, it often prompts clients to share their own shortcomings as well, which in turn can give us more insight and help us do our job better.

So what is the answer to the question posed in the title of this piece? I honestly believe that, by  and large, great clients are made and not born. I’m willing to own my responsibility for the bad clients in my past by acknowledging that I have not always followed the principles stated above. But as I move forward in my agency capacity, I vow to put these values at the forefront of my efforts. Doing so may mean I lose a prospective client or two on the way, but I am confident that the ones I win will be great ones.

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Is Your Computer Getting in the Way of Your Productivity?

June 16, 2010 by Michelle

Back in 2005, in one of our IMA eNews articles, “Finding Your Way Back,” we commented on a New York Times Sunday Magazine article which talked about how our computers are distracting us from focusing on our work.  We quoted the article as follows:

…a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, [Gloria Mark, a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior] says, “far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.

In the past five years, the problem has only gotten worse. A more recent article, “Stay on Target,” appeared in The Economist, featuring computer software that “disables bits of your computer to make you more productive.”  The article says:

The problem with working on a computer, after all, is that computers provide so many appealing alternatives to doing anything useful: you can procrastinate for hours, checking e-mail, browsing social-networking sites or keeping up with Twitter.

Keeping such diversions at bay involves some technological jiu-jitsu, using the power of one piece of software as a defense against distraction from others. Some programs fill the whole screen to keep disturbing alerts hidden; others disable specific websites, such as Facebook, or even cut off internet access altogether. The idea is similar to parental-control programs that prevent children from accessing inappropriate content: but these are controls that grown-up users deliberately impose upon themselves.

The program goes on to discuss several of these software packages, then focused on one in particular, called Freedom, which, they say “may be the ultimate tool to ward off distractions.”

How I discovered the article is disturbingly ironic. I was in the midst of working on a client’s business requirements document when I received an IM from a friend, who suggested I check out her Facebook status. The lure of the message was too much for me, so I did so, then followed her link to her blog post, and navigated from there to this article.

The whole reason my friend IM’ed me about this was because we’ve often talked about how distracting it can be to focus at work or at home because, as the Economist piece describes, we’re afflicted by “continuous partial attention” – constantly time slicing and doing bits of tasks at a time.

We’re curious – how do you deal with the everyday distractions online? Have we come to such a state that we actually need digital babysitters to stay on track?

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When Does Free Email Cost Too Much?

June 10, 2010 by Michelle

An IMA client who actively utilizes our email expertise gave us a call after we sent out an email blast to his subscribers. “What in the world is this double green underline under the word ‘Benefits?’ in the email message?” he asked. “When I roll over it, a strange game pops up.”

We were stumped. We went back and opened the message in our own email. No double green underline, no link from the word ‘Benefits,’ which looked like every other word.

“What email client are you using?” we asked.

Turns out it is Outlook Express, which is a Microsoft, browser-based, free product. That fact made us turn to Bing to look up the word ‘Benefit,’ and sure enough, in the Merriam Webster dictionary definition, there were double-green underlines under the word, which led to a Vibrant Media-generated ad.

Clearly, Microsoft had decided to monetize its free service by allowing certain words to be flagged in its Outlook Express emails.  Now, almost the same thing that happens in a Google-based gmail account – ads appear on the right-hand side that are based on the subject of the email themselves. But somehow, that never seemed to intrude on the private nature of the actual email. The fact that in the Microsoft model underlines appear in the body of the email and that moving your mouse over them pops up a definition or an ad – somehow makes this way of presenting the ads much more intrusive. And definitely feels like an invasion of privacy.

If I can chance a baseball analogy here, it’s as if the billboards along the side of the field ended up in the middle of the action. Just when an outfielder catches the ball, an enormous sign flies out of his mitt, and we’re all forced to read an ad for Happy Endings Ice Cream, or something else equally ludicrous.

For the client, worse followed the next day, when we had occasion to send out a message that a member of the subscriber base had passed away. Ads originated from the words funeral, cemetery, and cremation.  Microsoft had moved out of the realm of the merely annoying to something truly disrespectful.

Now, our email may not be the private matter we think it is, but we don’t need that fact rubbed in our faces. Microsoft, take a lesson from Google. You will lose your free Outlook Express users if this is what they have to put up with. For an ad to be successful, you have to allow your users to ignore it when they need to – stay out of the body of our email messages!

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IMA Salutes Hackers For Hope

May 27, 2010 by Michelle

IMA recently launched the updated 2010 Hackers for Hope website and would like to take this opportunity to salute this worthy organization.

Since 1988, Hackers For Hope has raised funds primarily through an annual golfing event held in Darien, CT, which will take place on September 24.  This year, a new event has been added, which will take place in Verona, Pennsylvania on July 23.

In the spring of 1986, Alfred E. Smith, IV and Edward D. Brown (Tim) were diagnosed with cancer while in their 30′s.  As a result of their prognosis, each underwent treatment of chemotherapy or radiation and neither was able to return to work for the remainder of that year.  Both members of the Wee Burn Country Club in Darien, Connecticut, Al and Tim spent the summer of 1986 on the golf course.  Despite feeling weakness from their treatment, playing golf allowed them physical activity outside and refocused their attention away from their disease to a more positive attainable goal – improving their golf game.

In 1988, Al and Tim wanted to do something to raise funds for the American Cancer Society while making use of their golf skills.  Al and Tim enlisted Dr. Michael Moore of Sloan-Kettering and Bob Rex and put together a small “golf marathon” fundraiser.  The original group of golfers played or “hacked” from sun up to sun down.

They called the event “Hackers For Hope” and Wee Burn Country Club fully supported Al and Tim’s efforts.  They raised $47,000 for the American Cancer Society in that first year. Since that first “tournament” in 1988, the Hackers For Hope Program has grown exponentially.  Incorporated in 1994, Hackers For Hope has refocused its mission to provide funding for local cancer research and treatment centers in the New York and Connecticut areas, such as the Bennett Cancer Center at Stamford Hospital in Stamford, Connecticut and Memorial Sloan-Kettering and St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers – Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York. In total, Hackers For Hope has donated close to $9,000,000 to these and other organizations.

In addition to adding a new venue this year, the updated Hackers for Hope site includes a forum where users can send a note of encouragement to a Hacker, share experiences with cancer treatment/recovery, or raise awareness of any exciting research or treatment developments.

We at IMA are always inspired by the work done by our many non-profit clients and hope that 2010 is Hackers For Hope’s best year ever!

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A Results-Driven Marketer’s View of the Sales Cycle

May 21, 2010 by Aimee

Yesterday, we talked about a candy-based marketing lesson that taught a group of students the adoption model. Today, the only kind of candy we’ve got to offer are virtual sweets – how search marketing, social media, and email marketing fit into a very similar model.

Interactive Media Associates - Online Sales and Marketing Cycle

Here’s how these techniques can help you through this cycle – which, I should add, is still a work in progress:

  • Search engine marketing can be effective at any stage of the sales cycle. Natural search (SEO) is effective at all stages, supporting branding, lead generation, acquisition, referral, and more. Paid search is supportive in the same ways, but pay-per-click is particularly effective for acquisition. I used to think that paid search was only truly effective for generating leads and sales, but I was wrong about that. Let’s say, for example, you’re a major electronics provider – we’ll call you Acme for this example (yes, I’m a big “Road Runner” fan). You’ll certainly buy all your branded terms in search, like “Acme Electronics”, “Acme televisions”, etc. for awareness and interest. You’ll probably also buy product-related terms, such as “3-D flat screen television” and “10 megapixel digital camera” for acquisition. But would consider buying terms like “Acme digital camera driver for Windows 7” or “Acme HDTV 174S output cable”? You should. These are terms that will help drive your retention and referral efforts, and keep your customers from calling the Geek Squad instead of your customer service desk.
  • Social media is most effective at the awareness phase, adding “air cover” and supporting both search and public relations. It’s also very effective at the retention and referral phases. However – and feel free to state your arguments here – it’s my belief that social media is not yet effective in the acquisition phase. Your social media friends do NOT want to be sold to. Sure, you can share your products with them, your branded games, your tips and advice – but if you try to sell to your fans on Facebook and Twitter (or other social networks), you’re just going to irritate people. Social media is most effective at raising awareness and interest and engaging contacts. It is not a channel amenable to the strong call to action.
  • Email marketing is strongest at the acquisition, retention, and referral phases of the sales and marketing cycle. As stated in our recent blog post, reports of the death of email are greatly exaggerated. Email is still a highly effective channel, and it still drives among the highest ROI of all marketing channels. According the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), email’s return on investment last year was $43.52 for every dollar invested, and Epsilon reported that open rates in 2009 remained a strong 22%. That’s a jump of 5% from the previous year. And click-through rates averaged nearly 6% in ‘09.

    • So just to dive a little deeper with email, think of it this way: You can use email newsletters at pretty much any stage of the cycle. They’re great for pretty much anything, including acquisition. Fitness Magazine’s “Fit List” emails are a great example of this – the drive interest with sexy subject lines, they contain links to relevant (to me!) content that drives the reader to the site, and every email contains a discount on subscriptions to their print magazine. Once you’ve converted and subscribed to the magazine, the emails keep you engaged with that great content.

    Another great example of effective email marketing is the strategy used by Edible Arrangements. Not a week goes by when I haven’t received an email reminding me about how I need to send a gift for Administrative Professional’s Day or some other forgotten occasion. And look, in this email, they just happen to have the perfect, most appropriate gift available at three affordable price points, easily ordered online… That’s leveraging email for acquisition.

We left out mobile on our chart, which is still a work in progress. Mobile, in my opinion, is also effective at every stage of the cycle…but it’s more complicated. Mobile is a universe unto itself, offering so many channels – SMS, mobile web sites, mobile apps, in-app advertising, mobile web advertising. You can almost build a sales cycle chart *just* for mobile!
Maybe that should be our next post.

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Candy-Coated Marketing Lesson

May 20, 2010 by Michelle

Back when I was teaching Public Relations Writing and Message Design at a local college, I used to start off with an exercise that would teach the students how the adoption process can be used to persuade individuals to purchase a new product.

I would hand one student a magazine with an ad for Pop’ables, which was then a new brand by the Mars candy company – bite-sized Three Musketeers, Milky Ways, and Snickers candies.

“You’re in a dentist’s office, waiting for your turn in the chair, and you come across this ad,” I’d instruct the student.  This, I told the class, was Awareness – when you learn that the product exists.

We then brainstormed on what someone might think of this new, bite-sized candy. We talked about calories, kid-appeal, the fact that it might be a good movie snack.

“So now you’re interested,” I told the class. “What do you do next?”

We talked about Interest, how someone might gather more information through repeated ads, talking it over with friends – the water cooler approach – or even going to the product Web site to learn more.

I would then pull out a previously well-hidden little cup, containing a sample of the Pop’ables, handing them over to one of the students. At this point, everyone was paying close attention.

“So now you’re in BJs, or Costco, and someone’s handing out samples,” I told the lucky student. “This is the Trial stage.”

The student, tasting the candy, would Evaluate it, making a yes or no decision on whether to buy the candy. (It was always yes!)

So finally, I’d pull a full bag of Pop’ables out, making everyone in the class cheer. “Now that we’ve Adopted the product, let’s pass it around and share it,” I’d conclude. No one ever forgot the adoption process after this!

I was reminded of this exercise lately, when we were discussing how the techniques of social media, search marketing, and email marketing play into a similar model. We’ll talk about that in our next post.

(And by the way, don’t go looking for Pop’ables. They may have been adopted by my class, but not by the public at large – and have been discontinued.)

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What’s Big Brother Doing with Our Private Data?

May 17, 2010 by Michelle

A very long time ago (longer than I want to remember, frankly), I was studying for my certification in technical writing. One of our projects was a report on the future of technology, and one of my classmates gave his on the dangers technology posed to privacy. I remember feeling panic as he described how our data would someday be interconnected and available for various agencies, businesses, even random people who had access.

Fast forward more than two decades later. The recent uproar over Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s January 2010 statement about the changing attitudes toward privacy ― and how it’s playing out today on Facebook ― reminded me of this presentation.

Back in January, when Zuckerberg made the statement, blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web posted his remarks in a blog entry:

“…in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

They just went for — what? A recent article on Wired, “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative,” explains:

Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.

So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

That more than 20-year old fear came back. Is the privacy we’re giving up for convenience worth the price? We’d like to hear what you think.

And just to underline the fear, we’ll leave you with an instructional video from the ACLU that  that first surfaced a few years back on YouTube. This reality isn’t that far away:

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On Our Toes for the Boston Ballet School

May 12, 2010 by Michelle

Our recent release of the Boston Ballet School’s registration module has us thinking toe shoes and tutus.

Visitors to the Boston Ballet School can learn about the School’s various programs, ranging from classes for children, pre-professional dancers, and adults, which are offered in four different Boston-area studios: Newton, Norwell , Boston’s South End, and  Marblehead. The entire architecture of the site was redone to enhance the user’s experience, enabling them to find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

Chief among the new achievements of this rollout was the ability to automate Boston Ballet School class inquiries, registrations, and placement. Previously, Boston Ballet School staff utilized a manual paper process to register all students. Each student or parent was required to fill out and send in a form, which the staff would then need to key into their backend systems.  This system was prone to user error and absorbed enormous resources in staff dollars, time and aggravation.

The new online registration system is completely automated with Boston Ballet School’s backend systems, which allows staff members considerably more time to organize the coming term.  Parents and students have instant confirmation of the classes they have enrolled in, or put on a waiting list if the class is full.

The registration system is built on the foundation of IMA’s Enterprise Performing Arts Framework, which integrates content management, eCommerce, and box office software into a single system, leveraging each tool for its own particular strengths. By creating a family profile – in which parents can add multiple children – the system automatically recognizes each student’s training level and offers only the appropriate classes. Classes are further filtered by the location selected. Students who are new to the school are given specific class options based on the student’s age, which reduces their trepidation about selecting the wrong class. Both classes and profiles are dynamically compiled from the Tessitura box office system, which means that site visitors are seeing only the most up-to-date information.  And finally, parents can opt to select one of three payment options – including an off-line option – to enroll students in classes.

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Hitting the High Notes

May 7, 2010 by Michelle

“I love the new, energized www. operanews.com; this is true cyber-elegance,” responded one reader on the redesigned OPERA NEWS’s new blog.

We have to agree. The recently launched site is an aria of Web 2.0 sophistication, spectacular imagery, new media enhancements, and the Ektron content management system.  With significantly re-organized content and a stunning new design, the new site truly is a world-class online publication, complete with exclusive online copy and multimedia that the print version could only dream of.

The site was developed using the Ektron content management system (CMS), enabling staff members to focus on their editorial mission of promoting the Opera art form rather than wrestling with technology. Ektron’s smartform technology was extended to enable the client to enter content in one spot, and have it disseminated in different flavors on various pages throughout the site – for example, on the homepage, in the table of contents, and on the departmental landing pages.

“The revamped operanews.com is a major step forward in how our established readership, as well as newcomers to opera, interacts with the magazine,” online OPERA NEWS editor Adam Wasserman said. “The design, at once inviting, efficient, and functional, highlights the breadth of content featured on the site and in the print edition. It is truly the opera-lover’s home on the Internet.”

Visit the new site today at www.operanews.com and see for yourself that we’ve really hit the high notes with this site launch!

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Is eMail marketing kicking the bucket? A contrary view.

May 5, 2010 by Michelle

Yesterday, IMA’s Aimee Kessler Evans posted a blog post “Email may not be sexy, but it still delivers results.”

In her post, Aimee said:

… while marketing via Facebook or advertising on mobile apps may be the hottest new trend, we urge to go “old school” and keep email marketing in mind as you plan your next marketing campaigns. Sure it’s practically geriatric in web years, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.

But we also posted a (somewhat) contrary view in our September 2009 IMA eNewsletter, “Is the eMail Newsletter Dead?”  IMA VP, Business Development, Anthony Zarro wrote:

I have often said – sometimes to the dismay of fellow IMA staff members – that eMail newsletters will eventually be replaced by company blogs.  While that has not yet happened to the extent I thought it would, I definitely do see the trend moving over to social media in the form of company FaceBook, LinkedIn & Twitter pages.

The reason for this should be clear to anyone who opens their email client on a daily basis. Competition for the inbox is fierce. Because we’re all faced with so much clutter, we are forced to delete or ignore many of these communications.  How many times have you said that you’ll come back to read a newsletter when you have more time – and never did so? The messages that once were getting through, loud and clear, are now getting lost in the spam filter or are simply being ignored.

While we are not advocating that you stop sending email newsletters, this strikes us as the perfect time to test the utilization of your company communication in social media. Building a company profile page on FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are quick and easy tasks.  Once they are live, all you have to do is post the same content that you would ordinarily have posted to your newsletter.

There are additional benefits to using this medium for company communications.  The social media channels are easily indexed by the search engines.  Content that was once sent via email and never found by the engines now appear in the organic search listings potentially exposing your thought leadership to a much larger audience.  If you begin looking for social media listings in all your search activity you’ll notice a growing presence on page one for sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook.

Posting your content in the social spaces is significantly more effective if you have an audience.  I highly recommend sending an email to your existing list letting them know where they can find you in the social spaces and encourage them to become a FaceBook fan, a LinkedIn connection, or to follow you on Twitter. It is also sound business practice to include the appropriate icons on your Web site as well as links in your eMail signature.  Just remember, social media is about dialogue and is a great venue for sharing your thought leadership.  Encourage your audience to participate in the conversation, ask questions, request information and share their thoughts.

By utilizing this marketing channel, not only will you be able to easily keep your clients, prospective clients, vendors, friends, and others updated, but you will also expand your network via exposure to the friends of your fans.  Spending a few minutes each day on these tasks will greatly expand your reach beyond the size of your eMail list.

Now, while Anthony clearly makes the point, “we are not advocating that you stop sending email newsletters,” there are clearly two differing points of view about the effectiveness of email campaigns.

So we wonder – is email just wise for its years, or is it really on its last legs? Let us know what you think, okay?

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