You Can Get Satisfaction!

Anybody can relate to the frustration that comes with being sent through long lines of red tape to ask a question. A new San Francisco based website is aiming to simplify that process by providing customers with a forum to voice questions and comments about any company they choose.

The site is appropriately named “Get Satisfaction,” and as reported in the Sunday Times, since it’s September launch customers have been able to comment on over 2,000 companies. Already, 40% of these companies have caught on and publicly responded, so when future customers come searching with similar questions, both sides can rest assured there may already be an answer waiting for them at www.getsatisfaction.com. Anyone can visit the site, search through questions similar to their own , or post a new thread. Company representatives then post answers, and the question is added to the database for future users. Essentially, it’s an instruction guide shaped by user feedback.

Spongecell is on board with Get Satisfaction, using the site to communicate with users and the ins and outs of interactive calendars and widgets. Already, the site is facilitating our ability to build instructional content for our users, how to get the most out of our interactive marketing tools, and giving tons of hints on how to take advantage of complete customization. The best part? Users can get questions answered whenever they need…Sound too good to be true? Check it out at www.getsatisfacion.com, and challenge a Sponge Rep give you satisfaction.

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On the Radio..

Our very own Ben Kartzman recently gave a radio interview! Thought you all wouldn’t want to miss hearing our CEO making Spongecell’s radio debut, enjoy!

radio show

SMBs: Owners wearing too many hats. Why not streamline your communications vehicle?

 

In most small to mid-sized businesses, the owner often wears too many hats – chief executive, visionary, head of sales, marketer and chief bottle washer. In order to grow any business, you need time to concentrate on revenue generating activities and significantly decrease the time spent on non-income activities (which includes administration of any kind).

Like any other SMB, marketing is a critical part to getting recognized and to sell your products or services. Often, SMBs turn to some type of email communications/marketing – most often using Constant Contact for email newsletters – but the truth is, that’s a one-way push from the company to their target audience. And, not much of the process is simplified as you still have to manually enter in information into a contact management database among other things. Many SMBs will make the argument that you can track open rates, but what are you really tracking? The open rate doesn’t tell how interested the individual is, where he/she will go for more information, if the communiqué is forwarded and other details that will allow the SMB to re-target and customize additional communications.

Here’s what we would suggest you look for in a communications vehicle:

• Find a tool that allows you to create an ongoing dialogue with your customers with the ability to segment and target different groups within the audience to customize your communications.
• Ease-of-use for your audience to
  • share information with their circle of friends, family and professional acquaintances
  • select how they would like to obtain information – from email to SMS to Facebook
  • easily move information from a non-permanent media (online or email) to their permanent media – Outlook calendars, Google and Yahoo! online calendars, etc. – and into their lives.
• The ability to integrate into social networks and easily manage all communications (Let’s face it. Businesses need social network marketing, but it can be a major time sucker! Find a tool that streamlines the whole process)
• A robust tracking function that allows SMBs to gage the level of interest in the products, services or events/activities based on interactivity through a website, email, SMS, etc.
• Streamlined management of all electronic communications, period.

You’ve been Invited to: My Opinion

Britopian’s blog says it best. See below.

“I’m a consumer and I demand to be heard! Yes, that’s right and I hope you are listening! You see, I just left your restaurant and twittered my network (via my cell phone) about my experience there. And then when I get home, I am going to go online to YELP and write a review about you. I hope for your sake, that you provided good service. Then, I am going to log on to wordpress and document my experience in my blog. I may even bookmark my own post in Digg and Stumble. Then, I’ll go to Yahoo and Google and search for “your restaurant review” and see what others are saying about you. I’m curious; and may even chime in if I feel the need. And then if I have time, I will shout out a bulletin to my MySpace friends with links to my latest blog entry; right after I post a status message on Facebok of course. Lastly, I am sure that your restaurant will be a topic of discussion when we have friends over for dinner this weekend.”- Britopian’s Blog

The moral of the story is this:
-We ALL have access to tons of new interactive tools for getting our message out, getting heard, and connecting with an audience across different online platforms.

- As a restauranteer, business person, joe schmo–anyone has the ability to promote, extend, and shape the conversation that’s taking place online. Take your pick—widgets, sms, event calendars, email blasts– all powerful interactive tools we can use to spread the word, and shape a conversation about our food, brand, service.

- With the ability to gather data about who/what is contributing to the conversation, nobody needs to run from negative feedback—we just want to make sure we get to hear the conversations, adapt, and move forward with a better product/service.

Building Buzz: Advertising your brand online

While the internet allows advertisers the ability to track consumer response and behavior, advertisers are still hesitant to put more faith and money in the Internet, doubting how well the internet can shape broader brand messages. The internet is one of the few advertising platforms on an upward trend, but marketers are still spending more (22% ) of advertising budgets on TV, and significantly less (6%) online, according to a recent article on Forbes.com. So why are the advertisers missing golden opportunities?”It’s not clear how Crest should leverage search advertising. How many people are going online to search for toothpaste? It’s not [obvious that] a little ad on the screen is going to attract them. For the biggest bulk of media spending, online is just hard to figure out.”(Patti Williams, Wharton Marketing Professor)

Shaping broader brand messages is where widget marketing applications take center stage. The ability to customize a variety of widgets, and deliver a consistently reliable message and intact branding, wherever the brand’s audience wants to take the widget, creates a unique (and expansive) marketing atmosphere; websites, social networks, calendar’s, SMS. The target of the advertisers brand-building objectives, is further enhanced by Spongecell widgets’ ability to gather behavioral data and tailor ads based on data and consumer feedback. Advertisers can build a large-scale branded campaign and take full advantage of tremendous opportunities to reach their target audience.

The New Gold Standard

Adweek published a wonderful article on how using data wil change the future of interactive marketing. Data analysis provides the ability to track level of interest as measured by actual behaviors online, and is the most powerful tool to date, for reaching those audiences that will be open and receptive to a given message.

“With Google’s pending acquisition of DoubleClick and Microsoft’s addition of aQuantive, two enormous data platforms are emerging. Meanwhile, agencies and clients are beginning to see this information as their most precious commodity, to be mined for targeting, analysis and, yes, even creative insights.” The New Gold Standard, Adweek 2/1/08

The back-story of the financial industry is illustrative of what is currently happening in the ad world. Before electronic trading was possible, the tools used for communicating left room for interpretation, in stark contrast to the present quantitative tools of measurement we can watch 24/7 on Bloomberg TV.

Similarly, the ad world has a need for measurable results, which has led to high demand of data tracking technology. The ability to follow interest is powerful, because it allows advertisers to predict what the audience is going to do before they deplete their resources (and there’s not as much room for interpretation as in focus groups of the past). In addition, determining how many people visit a web site has led to the development of tagging systems will help measure “audience segments” across sites.

With these new metrics taking hold there is an emerging sense of data overload throughout the ad world, while advertisers try to build their own “data warehouses”. It should be clarified that RAW data is not useful all alone, but PROCESSED data, like that generated by Spongecell, that provides useful information about audience interest.

What Women Want (on the Web)

Women have emerged as the majority of overall online users, and as a result they have also emerged as a powerful and desirable demographic for advertisers. Where are women going and what are they doing online – or as Mel Gibson might say, what do women want?

Men may click through 3,000 pages of sports news before lunch, but women are a little less predictable. It would be premature to stereotype women’s online activities as shopping for jeans or researching the latest hairstyles, because according to a number or recent surveys discussed in AdAge, the big picture looks quite different:

Parenting: Over 43 million mom’s are online every day spending 85 minutes on average, and one of their most common activities is to monitor what their kids are doing online (time to change your MySpace page!).

Romance: When it comes to online romance, women haven’t really met their Match(.com). Many women feel online dating has been a meaningful experience, but at the same time they think online dating is for losers.

YouTube: Last year, only 27% of women were visiting video sharing sites like YouTube, while today 43% (that’s almost a 20% increase, in one year!)

Healthy Living: Fifty percent of women feel more comfortable consulting the internet about health care information than their doctors. Health fact finding (think nutrition and exercise advice) is also common among younger women (ages 25-34).

Shopping: I didn’t say NEVER searched for jeans! According to a study conducted by Burst Media, during the first half of 2007 54% of women shopped online, and in order of popularity they shop for travel, adult clothing, health and beauty products, children’s clothing, financial products, food or groceries. Women are also more likely to make impulse purchases, especially with limited time offers or free incentives.

Grassroots Politics for a New Generation: What Can We Learn From the Primary Elections?

Super Tuesday just passed, and for the first time in many years the day did not decide the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. While John McCain appears to have locked down the Republican nomination, the race is still wide open between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In such an important race with the opportunity to change the direction of the country, it is unfortunate that candidates did not do more to connect with voters online. We are honored this week to be able to share our opinions on what marketers can learn from the primary elections through publishing an opinion piece in the prominent publication MediaPost. It’s worth a quick read – click here

Influencing the Influencers – Joining the Circle of Trust

We must admit, we love talking about interactive marketing, and we jump at the chance to voice our opinions on how to do it right anytime we get. This month, Spongecell President Ben Kartzman had the chance to contribute a piece to Adotas on how to influence the most influential folks on the internet – you know, the people who always start conversation threads in forums, pass viral videos and cool stories, the ones who discover all the cool things people pass on and share – check out the article here.

In a nutshell, by providing tools to share content brands can give influencers control over their experience of how to choose what is “cool” to introduce to others, while brands also maintaining control of their online identity because they control the mechanisms to move and share content.

And stay tuned for more – this is the first of 6 we’re writing for Adotas.