Last week the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) announced it is considering cutting Saturday delivery. It's about time. In fact, the mail doesn't need to stop being delivered on Saturday, it needs to stop being delivered completely.
In a recent TechCrunch article, entrepreneur Marc Andreessen
suggested that traditional media outlets "burn the boats," meaning they should stop publishing print versions of their publications. We need to do the same thing when it comes to sending mail.
The Problems with Mail
Mail kills 5.2 million trees every year.
Mail is wasteful and inefficient. News outlets that have been covering the story about the potential of eliminating Saturday delivery have been missing the point. This issue isn't about the impact no mail delivery on Saturday would have. Instead, it is about asking the question: Is mail a viable communication method anymore? We are a society that has long thrived on innovation. We have been willing to stop using methods of communication once they have become antiquated; consider the elimination of telegraphs.
Last year, Mike Volpe
wrote an article about the waste and environmental damage caused by direct mail advertising. Today, let's think bigger.
While the United States Postal Service is self-funded, it operated at a loss of nearly 2 billion dollars last year. The 2009 operating budget for the United States Postal Service was 79.2 billion dollars. Think about the impact that nearly 80 billion dollars could have if it were directed at improving digital communications infrastructure like rural broadband Internet access or improved technology in pubic schools. As Americans, we have allowed printed mail to hold us back from more efficient and innovative communications opportunities.
In the last quarter of 2009 (October 1, 2009 - December 31, 2009), the USPS delivered 21,218,826 pieces of first class mail. First class mail consisted of less than half
of all mail delivered during this time. If we think conservatively and say every first class piece was only one piece of paper and one envelope, then as Americans we wasted more than 42.4 million sheets of paper in only 90 days. This paper usage does not even begin to account for the 260,000 vehicles the postal service has on the road and the fossil fuels they burn every day.
Building USPS 2.0
Delivering messages has never been easier, and the content in them has never been more important. As a society, we don't need to kill the United States Postal Service. Rather, we need to transform it into United States Postal Service 2.0. In an economy built on innovation and intellectual property, the countries with the best infrastructures to support their growth will achieve economic success and stability. What if your mailman, instead of delivering mail every day, was trained to support the digital messaging systems and pipelines of the U.S.?
Imagine a world where 656,000 employees
of the USPS were focused on issues like network stability and protecting citizens from spam and illegal content. The United States Postal Service is the second-largest civilian employer in the United States. Committing resources on that scale to digital communication would transform our society.
By creating USPS 2.0, the United States government (aside from the obvious environmental savings) could build a digital communication network supported by a purpose-driven organization that would position the United States far ahead of other nations.
Getting Back to Storytelling
The foundation of great inbound marketing is compelling content and great storytelling. In the world of direct mail and junk mail, our culture has lost the real reason people actually used to send letters -- to tell stories. In shifting away from printed letters, some of the team members of the USPS could be trained to help businesses and individuals better tell their stories. Imagine that a few years from now, instead of going to the post office to mail a letter, you take your daughter there to learn how to edit a video she will be sending electronically to her grandparents.
Think about a world where blue post office boxes are turned into wireless access points and post office buildings become places of storytelling and real-time information sharing.
Direct and junk mail that nobody reads is wasteful. Betting on a dying form of communication is just as wasteful because it robs America of an opportunity to lead a world driven by digital communication. Let's stop sending pointless direct mail ads that don't work and fail to prove return on investment. Let's stop flooding mailboxes with bills and statements that most people already view online. Let's band together and say "no" to mail and "yes" to USPS 2.0!
Who is coming with us?
Photo by: Ed Siasoco
Webinar: Rethinking Marketing
| Want to learn more about how you can use inbound marketing to grow your business?
Download the free webinar to learn how to turn your website into an internet marketing machine. |
Article has
24 comments.
Click To Read/Write Comments
Boring presentations suck.
Don't you hate it when you attend an event and feel like the speaker is completely wasting your time?
Conferences are expensive and networking time is too valuable to waste by sitting down and listening to a bad speaker. With South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) coming up, our team wanted to solve this problem.
Speaker Grader is the newest free tool to join the Grader family. It rates speakers at conferences via votes gathered from Twitter.
It is easy to get started with Speaker Grader. While attending a presentation, send a tweet that contains all 3 of the following:
- The @speakertwittername
- The #eventhashtag
- Your vote, which is either #upvote if you think the speaker is doing a good job or #downvote if you are unhappy with the presentation.
Optional: Any other feedback you wish to include in your tweet is fine, but make sure the first three items are also included.
So a sample tweet for SXSW would look something like:
"I #upvote @GaryVee for speaking with passion at #sxsw."
Using Speaker Grader is as simple as sending a tweet; no sign up or login needed.
Please make sure to check out
Speaker Grader during SXSW to see who is being voted as the best and worst speakers from the event.
One more thing...
As a way to reward people who take the time to grade speakers during SXSW, we will be giving away Apple iPads. More specifically ...
The most active Speaker Grader voter each day will win an iPad!
Note: Individuals are only eligible to win once. The most active grader at the end of each day (11:59 p.m. Central Time) of the conference will win an iPad.
Get SXSW News:
HubSpotters will be live-blogging SXSW, covering the hottest presentations and announcements. For the latest HubSpot SXSW coverage, please stay tuned to http://blog.hubspot.com/sxsw.
Article has
5 comments.
Click To Read/Write Comments
Marketers are shifting their budgets away from traditional marketing channels and toward digital marketing channels. Econsultancy, in association with ExactTarget, surveyed more than 265 B2B marketers -- in companies of all sizes -- asking if they plan to spend more or less of their marketing budgets in 2010 on 14 different marketing tactics. While 46% of companies plan to increase their overall marketing budgets in 2010, 66% will increase their investments in digital marketing.
Digital channels make up the top 5 tactics in which marketers are investing:
1. Off-site Social Media - 65%
2. Search Engine Optimization - 64%
3. On-site Social Media - 58%
4. Email (acquisition) - 56%
5. Email (retention) - 53%
All of these tactics work together to help you get found and draw prospects to you.
Leaving Traditional Marketing Behind:
We also see a trend in moving away from the traditional "push" marketing channels. The top 5 places marketers are looking to cut budgets:
1. Radio - 50% decrease
2. Television - 44% decrease
3. Newspapers / magazines - 44% decrease
4. Direct Mail - 30% decrease
5. Telemarketing - 22% decrease
Marketers are getting smart and going where their buyers are -- online. So where are you going to spend your precious marketing dollars? Pulling buyers to you by using inbound marketing or pushing your message out through traditional channels?
Inbound Lead Generation Kit
 | Learn how to generate more inbound leads using SEO, blogging, and social media.
Download the free kit for tips and tricks to drive more leads and business to your site. |
Article has
3 comments.
Click To Read/Write Comments
In our busy, time-constrained world, it is harder and harder to generate a large amount of content in a short amount of time. One solution to this problem is what I like to call Storybook Marketing. The general idea is to use age-old archetypes and paradigms to do an end run around the requirement to process everything. One of the best known examples of using these storytelling methods is a little film you may have heard of -- Star Wars. George Lucas was greatly affected by the Joseph Campbell book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. By using the "monomyth" idea presented in the book, Lucas was able to tell a story that people immediately engaged with and understood across many cultures because it was hard-wired into people's human experience. Imagine how much more powerful your business blog or tweets would be if they accessed people's core understandings of how the world works. But how might you do that?
Your Product as a Character
Think about your product or service as a character. Is your product the loveable rogue, such as Han Solo? Look again at your product or service's characteristics. Is it fun? Powerful? Efficient? Use those characteristics to discover who your "character" is. You must also understand where on its journey that character is. For example, if your service is new and groundbreaking, your character may be at the stage of "Crossing the First Threshold" where it "actually crosses into the field of adventure, leaving the known limits of [its] world and venturing into an unknown and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are not known." Certainly sounds like launching a new product or service, doesn't it? Use these characters and narrative structure to determine how to position your story.
What or who is your product's nemesis?
Discover what your product or service's nemesis is. Apple does this extraordinarily well. It is clear that Microsoft is the nemesis to be defeated. This gives them the ability to use certain shorthand when making comparisons and engages consumers who will frequently root for the "hero." That desire is coded in our humanity! Your nemesis needs not be a specific company or product. For example, it can be argued Google's nemesis
is closed and disorganized information. You probably know your mission, but defining your "nemesis" gives power to your mission and makes it easier to communicate.
Clear Goals for Your Product
Clearly set what your product must accomplish in order to win. You must have a goal for your consumers to pull for. Imagine trying to cheer for someone who is racing if you don't know where the finish line is! This doesn't need to be your final goal, just as an Olympian may ultimately be targeting a gold medal, but still has to win many races along the way. What races does your product or service need to to win? Setting those goals help consumers feel as if they are part of something and cause them to engage in the chase for it. Is it becoming the number one product in its niche? Is it helping 100,000 customers? Set this goal and communicate it. This also gives you fodder for frequent blog or Twitter updates -- the perfect excuse to remind people of your mission.
Use Symbols to Fill the Gaps
Think about what age-old symbols and other characters you can use to quickly fill in the blanks for your customers. One of the oldest examples of this is the snake. Simply using the snake as a symbol brings to mind evil and sneakiness. Symbols such as this can quickly fill in the blanks for customers and help set the right tone. Imagine if you were selling a personal safety product. Simply place a photo of a snake at the top of your blog entry. Immediately this prepares your readers' minds as you write about sneaky threats to their personal safety or how danger can creep up without them being aware. Your blog entries become super powered with an emotional charge that only symbols and archetypes can create.
These four tips together can power your inbound marketing in new and exciting ways. These techniques will allow you to quickly communicate information to your customers, and emotionally charge it. Your product or service will cease to be simply a product or service, but rather take on a personality and character that can be cheered for and supported.
In a time-compressed world, people talk about that which they care about most. Given a generic product or your storybook-empowered product, you will hold their interest while your competition will fade from their mind.
Photo: Hawee
| Listen to Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot for a 30 minute overview of the 2010 State of Inbound Marketing! Download the webinar now to learn how more than 230 professionals have been using inbound marketing to transform their businesses.
|
Article has
6 comments.
Click To Read/Write Comments
About the author: Tom Pick is an online marketing executive with KC Associates, a marketing and PR firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on B2B technology clients. He's also the award-winning writer of the Webbiquity blog, which focuses on B2B lead generation and Web presence optimization -- the fusion of SEO, search marketing, social media, content marketing and interactive PR.
You've seen the statistics. Over 90% of B2B decision makers use social media somewhere in their buying process. Two-thirds of B2B marketers have caught on, using social media in their marketing mix. Social media has a direct impact on brand search. Social media is mainstream.
And yet, many B2B companies struggle to show results. Part of the problem is that it's difficult to measure ROI with any precision, and part of it is confusion over whether social media is a marketing or PR activity (or something else, like customer service).
But the biggest factor is execution: according to a recent MarketingSherpa report, "two-thirds of marketers who work for organizations that have not used any form of social media marketing or PR consider themselves 'very knowledgeable' or 'somewhat knowledgeable' about this emerging strategy. Their overconfidence in unproven ability can doom social media initiatives to failure."
Here are eight common mistakes B2B companies make when jumping into social media marketing. Avoid these, and you'll greatly increase your chances of success.
1. Using social media as a direct response vehicle.
Unless your product is a price-sensitive impulse purchase (e.g. a restaurant tweeting about today's lunch specials), social media doesn't work well for direct response. For B2B companies, social media is primarily about interaction and knowledge sharing. A hard-sell approach is not only ineffective, but it can also damage a firm's brand.
2. Expecting instant results.
Social media is not like an advertising or email blast campaign designed to produce immediate results; it takes time to develop relationships, build significant blog readership or attract a large Twitter following. Social media marketing can produce significant results, but not overnight.
3. Failing to invest sufficient time and effort.
As a consequence of #2 above, many social media efforts are dubbed failures before they have a chance to succeed. Blogs have a few posts written and are then abandoned. Twitter accounts sit silent with only a handful of followers. Facebook fan pages go without updates for months on end. The B2B companies achieving results with social media are those that set a clear strategy, adjust tactics based on results and experience, and maintain commitment to their social media efforts.
4. Focusing internally.
Social media is about listening and interacting. Focusing only on your own message -- our product this, our company that -- is as boorish as talking only about yourself at a business mixer or cocktail party. Of course, you can link to your own blog posts or other content on occasion, but these should be mixed in with links to external content, and in the context of answering a question or providing helpful information to solve a problem.
5. Not building networks or using syndication.
It's not enough to have great content. You need other people sharing it on your behalf as well. Use your blog, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and other social media tools to build a network of influencers who will amplify your content, and use RSS syndication sites to expand the reach of your blog.
6. Having unoptimized and inconsistent profiles.
For CEOs and anyone who represents the "face" of your company to customers, prospects or other stakeholders, every profile on LinkedIn or other social networking sites is a marketing opportunity. While obviously allowing space for originality, every profile should include a compelling and consistent brand message (as well as links to the corporate website, blog, Twitter account, etc.).
7. Not monitoring.
One of the most significant aspects of social media is that it empowers others to share your message (or contradict it). You can't control every conversation about your brand in social media, but you can help shape them, or at least be seen as responsive in participating in them. Social media monitoring is imperative for understanding what's being said about your products or services, thanking your fans and responding to critics.
8. Ignoring synergy between different media.
Social media, your corporate website, PR activities and even online advertising don't exist in isolation from each other; the impact of all of these programs can be magnified by linking them wherever appropriate. Press releases should link to related content on your website or blog as well as to the profiles of anyone quoted. Your corporate website, email newsletters, even employee email signatures should link to your blog and Twitter account. Product microsites can be linked back to the corporate site or blog for additional information. Cross-linking between these different sites and sources raises your profile in search, maximizing your Web presence within your industry and product space.
Avoid these common mistakes, and you'll greatly enhance your company's success with social media.
Photo by: Truth Went Trendy
| Join HubSpot to learn tips and strategies to monitor your company's brand and engagement in social media in just 10 minutes per day!
Date and time: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 1:00pm ET Reserve your spot now to set up a solid routine to monitor your online presence! |
Article has
13 comments.
Click To Read/Write Comments
