Phillip Nones

Changing the Subject (Line)

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One of the reasons e-mail marketing has become so huge is because it’s so darned cheap. Compared to postal mail, e-mail costs just pennies. That means most marketers can achieve a better ROI for just a mediocre e-mail campaign compared to even the most successful direct mail effort.

However, a common complaint about e-mail versus postal mail is visibility. Since most viewers choose not to have their preview pane feature turned on, they must physically open an e-mail before they can view any of its contents.

This “one-step removed” dynamic means that many people never get to see and read a marketing message that would otherwise stand out if it showed up in someone’s postal mail delivery as a postcard or self-mailer promo piece.

In this scenario, the e-mail subject line becomes a huge “gatekeeper” element. What the subject says and how it’s said can make a difference in e-mail open and clickthrough rates. But just how much?

A new E-mail Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer, a firm providing e-mail marketing and newsletter services, provides some interesting clues. MailerMailer has been producing these reports since 2003. This report, the tenth one issued, was developed by analyzing a sampling of ~900 million e-mail messages sent through MailerMailer throughout the year 2009.

Among the elements tracked were the words used in e-mail subject lines. MailerMailer found that the most popular terms contained in the subject lines were:

 Coupons
 Daily
 Free
 News
 Newsletter
 Report
 Today
 Update
 Week (weekly)
 Year

Notice how each of these terms conveys a sense of WIIFM (“what’s in it for me?”) and/or a sense of time sensitivity. Interestingly, despite a prevailing concern that using the word “free” in the subject line risks more spam filtering, MailerMailer found that this term was one of the ten most popular terms used in subject lines during 2009.

And what about subject line length? The report found that shorter subject lines (containing less than 35 characters) outperformed longer ones. That’s generally just four or five words along with the corresponding spaces between them.

And the difference MailerMailer observed was significant: E-mails with shorter subject lines experienced an average open rate of ~17.5%, while those with longer subject lines had an open rate of only ~11.5%.

The same differential was found with clickthrough rates. For the e-mails with shorter subject lines the average clickthrough rate was ~2.7% … versus ~1.6% for e-mails with longer subject lines.

The MailerMailer report concludes that while composing shorter subject lines may be difficult to do (well), going through that exercise is well worth the extra effort. The results from ~900 million e-mails prove it.

China overtakes Japan … and who’s surprised?

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Chinese + Japanese FlagsThe somewhat breathless headlines earlier this week reporting that China had nudged past Japan to become the world’s second largest economy behind the United States, didn’t particularly grab me.

In fact, it seems almost anticlimactic that Japan has finally been overtaken. Hasn’t Japan’s economy been in the doldrums for years?

In some sense, it seems like Japan has hardly mattered now for the better part of 20 years. By contrast, economies like those in Brazil, India and the Far Eastern countries have been the ones shining brightly and getting most of the business coverage.

Actually, I’m old enough to remember a time, back in the 1980s, when the rise of Japan’s economy was of huge concern to American and European manufacturing and banking organizations. “Japan, Inc.” was a continuing topic in the pages of BusinessWeek and Fortune magazines. Japanese managerial styles and its participatory worker groups were the focus of many a management seminar and how-to business book.

What happened? During the 1980s, Japan’s economic miracle turned into a massive real estate bubble before imploding in the early 1990s. What came next was a “lost decade” – a stagnant economy from which the country has never really recovered.

And today, demographics and other factors are catching up with the country. Things like low population growth (and an aging population to boot), weak domestic demand for goods, slow growth in exports, a strong currency and even deflationary pricing forces … these are the characteristics most observers assign to the Japanese economy.

Some economic miracle, huh?

Meanwhile, China keeps chugging away, charting 10%+ annual growth rates even as the average Chinese citizen continues to earn just one-tenth of what American and Japanese workers make.

But if we look a little more closely at Japan’s experience, there may be lessons for us here in the U.S. In fact, some characteristics are uncanny in their similarity. More ominously, some economists believe that China is on course to overtake the U.S. and become the world’s biggest economy inside of ten years.

That seems startling on the face of it. But when you consider the symbiotic relationship between the U.S. and Chinese economies – we’re China’s largest export customer and they hold a ton of our dollars – it becomes easier realize just how much our two countries need one another.

“Accidental allies,” it turns out.

How the B-to-B Sales Process is Changing

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In my 20+ years in industrial, commercial and other non-consumer marketing communications, I’ve witnessed more than a few “big trends” affecting the nature of the selling process in the business realm.

One of the biggest of these is the approach that customers take when evaluating products and services they might be interested in purchasing. Recent research findings about these behaviors has been published that sheds more interesting light on where things are at the moment.

A survey of ~300 B-to-B managers was conducted in late 2009 by e-Research for Marketing (E-RM) for Colman Brohan Davis, a Chicago-based marketing organization. This survey, which was limited to respondents age 35 or younger, found that only a few of the 13 tools used to research products and services represented “traditional media” – print-based resources, trade shows, or consulting with industry colleagues by phone or in person.

Furthermore, the study found that even these four tactics are losing their importance compared to the use of online social networks, which were exploding in usage.

These survey results reminded me of a comment made by Adam Needles, director of B-to-B field marketing at Silverpop, an e-mail marketing company based in Atlanta. “Somewhere around age 30 to 35, you can draw a line in the sand between people who are used to calling around to get everything and [where it’s been] all about relationships face-to-face.”

In contrast, Needles has this to say about younger staffers who conduct a great deal of the buying cycle online: “You have people whose expectation is that companies should put everything on their web sites; they should be getting real-time feeds and information, and companies should be totally integrated into … the blogosphere.”

Younger staffers tend to be influencers more than decision-makers. But this is not to diminish their importance, as they are the ones charged with conducting the research and drafting investigative report summaries and preliminary recommendations. Ferreting out information through resources like webinars and social platforms such as Twitter and blog posts, while it may seem exotic and less consequential to older colleagues, is not at all foreign to these staffers.

And we shouldn’t forget that today’s “influencer” at a company is very likely tomorrow’s “decision-maker.”

Which gets us back to the ER-M study. One big takeaway from that research was that customers are looking into all the corners of offine and online communications to find the information they feel they need to make risk-averse and “CYA” decisions that are also the successful ones that pay off well – hence building their reputations inside their company.

Tactics like direct mail marketing may seem old-hat or even quaint, but they can still be quite effective, while e-mail marketing, while fast and cheap, elicits resistance from some because they feel inundated with marketing materials that are irrelevant to their needs.

I guess it’s yet more challenging news for already-fractured marketing communications program tactics that continue to be under tight budget constraints.

College education in America: What the hey, let’s party!

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The Five-Year Party, by Craig BrandonJust in time for the upcoming school year, a new book has hit the stores that launches a fierce attack against today’s college education in America. As a father of one recent college grad plus another daughter just beginning her sophomore year, The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child, by Craig Brandon (ISBN #ISBN-13: 978-1935251804) caught my eye.

Brandon is a former education reporter and college writing instructor. What’s his main beef? That college administrators have taken advantage of government loan largesse and other programs to create a campus environment that’s hardly conducive to the disciplined intellectual labor of learning. The way Brandon sees it, college administrators are more interested in students’ pocketbooks than their intellects.

Brandon trains most of his firepower on liberal arts colleges, many of which he characterizes as “education-free zones” where quaint traditional notions of learning – like attending classes and doing assigned homework – have gone by the boards. He cites statistics that only ~30% of students enrolled in liberal arts institutions graduate in four years … and that fully 60% take six years or more to get their undergraduate degrees.

The book outlines the conditions that contribute to these sorry statistics. Extensive student loan and grant programs mean that few if any students ever pay the “book rate” tuition at a private college or university. This has made it easier for institutions to raise tuition rates far in excess of the inflation rate.

Brandon claims it has also led school administrators to tolerate – even abet – the extra years students spend on campus. After all, it’s more money for them to pay officials their lucrative salaries … not to mention bankrolling the country-club like student centers and new athletic facilities that seem to be on every college’s wish list.

And during that extended time on campus, it’s “party on!” Never mind the lower educational standards … it’s easier and far more lucrative for colleges to give students what they want, rather than what they need, to build meaningful careers afterwards.

And what about the instructors? They may well lament the decline in educational standards. But they’ve found out the hard way that to enforce rigorous educational standards in the classroom invites a flurry of negative reviews on student evaluation forms (that are easily accessible online) – reviews that are often linked to tenure and promotion decisions. It’s easier to go with the flow, provide reasonably entertaining lectures … and give out decent grades to all but the worst performers.

But what does this mean for those students who decide to work hard during their college years and to graduate on time? They may end up with a degree that’s devalued in the eyes of employers.

Moreover, the general decline in the value of a college degree affects even those schools that have tried hardest to maintain the traditional rigors of education that once characterized nearly all liberal arts schools – practices such as requiring students to take extensive coursework in subjects that go beyond their chosen field of study.

Colleges like Davidson in North Carolina, Hillsdale in Michigan and Rhodes in Tennessee may make studying and achieving top grades a huge challenge for their students … but their regional reputations mean that those degrees don’t carry much cachet beyond a 300-mile radius of the school.

Meanwhile, students who attend some of the nation’s better-known ivy league universities or “near ivy” institutions sail on through, cafeteria-style, taking only coursework that is easiest or of greatest interest to them.

Who’s the bigger chump then?

It’s a bit painful to read The Five-Year Party … and hard to finish it without feeling pretty depressed about the state of liberal arts education in America. Besides, does anyone know of a liberal arts school or university that has actually gotten a good handle on controlling its spending? I can’t think of one.

This book makes it easier to recognize the merits of America’s community colleges, which help kids start out their higher education in ways that allow them to explore different areas of interest without the distractions of the “party hearty” campus atmosphere – or breaking the family bank for that matter. Institutions like Chesapeake College in my home area on Maryland’s Eastern Shore are doing yeomen work in this regard, and they deserve better recognition for it.

Are “News Hound” Behaviors Changing?

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News Hound Behaviors are ChangingMost of the people I know who are eager consumers of news tend to spend far more time on the Internet than they do offline with their nose in the newspaper.

So I was surprised to read the results of a new study published by Gather, Inc., a Boston-based online media company, which found that self-described “news junkies” are more likely to rely on traditional media sources like television, newspapers and radio than online ones.

In fact, the survey, which was fielded in March 2010 and queried the news consumption habits of some 1,450 respondents representing a cross-section of age and income demographics, found that more than half of the “news hounds” cited newspapers as their primary source of news.

By comparison, younger respondents (below age 25) are far more likely to utilize the Internet for reading news (~70% do so).

Another interesting finding in the Gather study – though not terribly surprising – is that younger respondents describe themselves as “interest-based,” meaning that apart from breaking news, they focus only on stories of interest to them. This pick-and-choose “cafeteria-style” approach to news consumption may partially explain the great gaps in knowledge that the “over 40” population segment perceives in the younger generations (those observations being reported with accompanying grunts of displeasure, no doubt).

As for sharing news online, there are distinct differences in the behavior of older versus younger respondents. Two findings are telling:

 More than two-thirds of respondents age 45 and older share news items with other primarily through e-mail communiqués.

 ~55% of respondents under age 45 share news primarily through social networking.

Also, more than 80% of the respondents in Gather’s study revealed that they have personally posted online comments about news stories. This suggests that people have now become more “active” in the news by weighing in with their own opinions, rather than just passively reading the stories. This is an interesting development that may be rendering the 90-9-1 principle moot.

[For those who are unfamiliar with the 90-9-1 rule, it contends that for every 100 people interacting with online content, one creates the content … nine edit, modify or comment on that content … and the remaining 90 passively read/review the content without undertaking any further action. It’s long been a tenet in discussions about online behavior.]

What types of news stories are most likely to generate reader comments? Well, politics and world events are right up there, but local news stories are also a pretty important source for comments:

 Political stories: 28%
 National/international news stories: 27%
 Local news stories: 22%
 Celebrity news: 13%
 Sports stories: 5%
 Business and financial news: 5%

And what about the propensity for news seekers to use search engines to find multiple perspectives on a news story? More than one-third of respondents report that they “click on multiple [search engine] results to get a variety of perspectives,” while less than half of that number click on just the first one or two search result entries.

And why wouldn’t people hunt around more? In today’s world, it’s possible to find all sorts of perspectives and “slants” on a news story, whereas just a few years ago, you’d have to be content with the same AP or UPI wire story that you’d find republished in dozens of papers — often word-for-word.

Remembering Mitch Miller (1911-2010)

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Mitch Miller: oboist extraordinaire.A "Sing Along with Mitch" best-seller.This past week the music industry lost an interesting personality when Mitch Miller died at age 99. While not well-known to today’s audiences, to people “of a certain age” (myself included), Mitch Miller was a pretty major figure in the world of music. He led a very interesting life that reflected the very best tradition of “making it” in the industry from the ground up.

Mitch Miller’s musical journey, like so many others of his generation, started with the obligatory piano lessons – that familiar trapping of middle-class upbringing for youngsters in the early years of the 20th century. In Miller’s case, a few lessons taught by a piano instructor with a horrific case of chronic bad breath was all it took to inspire the young man to look for another alternative – any alternative.

Upon learning that George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak Company and a major figure in arts philanthropy (he provided the seed money to found the famed Eastman School of Music, now part of the University of Rochester) was donating a vast collection of musical instruments to be used by schoolchildren, Miller took quick advantage of the opportunity. But instead of being able to select a shiny trumpet or trombone as he had hoped, he discovered that the only instruments left to choose from were the lowly woodwinds.

Deciding on the oboe was a critical event in Miller’s musical development. It turned out that he excelled in playing the instrument, subsequently earning enrollment in the Eastman School in his hometown of Rochester, NY. A singular talent, he graduated from Eastman to perform in symphony orchestras under legendary conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Sir Thomas Beecham and Artur Rodzinski.

Miller also moonlighted by playing in the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in New York City – a studio ensemble – where he caught the eye of several CBS producers who commissioned Miller to compose arrangements of popular songs. Thus began Miller’s transition from classical to pop music.

Miller’s fame grew exponentially when he began a series of albums featuring an all-male chorus titled Sing Along with Mitch. The first album was released in 1958 and went on to sell more than 8 million copies. The series would eventually total some 19 LP recordings.

A companion television program broadcast between 1961 and 1966 became popular with millions of viewers across the country – that’s where the famous “follow the bouncing ball” originated. Critics may have sniffed at Miller’s saccharine or schlocky arrangements of the Great American Songbook, but the record-buying public loved them.

In addition to his highly successful career as a performing artist, Mitch Miller also worked behind the scenes, helping to produce the record albums of famous pop artists. One such artist was Rosemary Clooney … another was Jimmy Boyd (whose song I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus sold over 2 million copies) … and Miller also produced the first record album for Aretha Franklin, effectively launching her star career.

Another famous singer Miller worked with was Johnny Mathis, whose albums he produced for many years. One time, Miller and Mathis discovered they needed to fulfill a recording contract by producing “one more” album – only to realize that they had precious little new material to record.

In yet another move that turned out to be fortuitous, Miller came up with the idea of releasing a Mathis “greatest hits” album consisting of nothing but already-released material. This album sold millions of copies, and sparked a whole new genre of “greatest hits” releases that would become a common practice for all the other popular artists of the day.

It’s no wonder the singer Tony Bennett has called Mitch Miller “perhaps the single most influential producer in the history of recording.” The music industry agreed, honoring him with a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2000.

With Mitch Miller’s passing, there are few performers left from the golden age of American popular music in the “easy listening” genre. A few artists such as K.D. Lang and Harry Connick, Jr. are carrying on the tradition, but it’s a pretty safe bet we’ll never again see the likes of a Mitch Miller.

An About-Face on Facebook?

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Facebook logoThis past week, social networking site Facebook trumpeted the fact that is signed up its 500 millionth member. That’s an impressive statistic — and all the more so when you realize that Facebook had only about 100 million registrants just two short years ago.

And the site is truly international these days, with ~70% of Facebook users living someplace other than the USA.

But there are some interesting rumblings in cyberspace these days that suggest the bloom may be off the rose for Facebook. After having climbed to the #1 perch in terms of registrations and site traffic, there are some intriguing new signs that all is not well in Farmville – or elsewhere in the land of Facebook.

Inside Facebook, an independent research entity that tracks the Facebook platform for developers and marketers, is reporting new Facebook registrations dropped in June to ~250,000. That may still seem like a lot of people, but it’s a far cry from the ~7.7 million new registrants in May.

Furthermore, looking at age demographics, Inside Facebook has concluded that in the critical 26-34 age group, the total number of U.S. users active on Facebook actually declined during the month of June.

Are these people being swayed by the privacy debate that’s happening concerning how much visibility Facebook postings are being given on Google and other search engines?

That may be one explanation for the decline, but there could be other forces at work as well. The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report from ForeSee Results, a web research and consulting firm, places Facebook’s ranking near dead-last on a list of 30 major online web sites in terms of customer satisfaction with site design and utility.

Who scored highest? Dowdy old Wikipedia. Even boring government sites like the IRS scored better.

It’s evident the issue goes far beyond privacy concerns. There’s also confusion or irritation with Facebook’s ever-changing user interface. As Aaron Shapiro wrote recently in Media Post’s Online Media Daily:

“The truth is, Facebook isn’t fun to use anymore. It’s become a chore, just one more place that busy people have to log in to stay up-to-date. And Facebook is making the goal of staying up-to-date harder and harder to achieve. There are so many apps like Farmville producing status updates, as well as people using Facebook as their repository for passing thoughts and private/public conversations, I have to sort through tons of what I don’t want to read before I get to something I want or need to know.”

Back in its early days, the beauty of Facebook was that it provided such an easy framework to stay connected with family and friends. It was a way to share photos and other personal information quickly – and almost effortlessly – with far-flung contacts all over the world.

Those attributes seem to have gotten buried in all of the “spammy” hi-jinks and gimmicks that characterize so much of today’s Facebook.

Considering the growing dissatisfaction with Facebook, ranging from things like privacy (mis)management and ubiquitous advertising to confusion with the site’s ever-changing design and irritating lack of utility, some industry watchers are predicting that users will begin seriously looking at alternatives. Despite Facebook’s huge presence and large pool of registrants, they may find simpler, purer sites out there that are more to their liking. Several that could be beneficiaries of the “Facebook fall-off” are Diaspora and Collegiate Nation.

YouTube’s Big Accomplishment

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YouTube logoHere’s an interesting milestone that YouTube has just achieved: In May 2010, it surpassed the 100-video mark in the average number of videos shown monthly to its U.S. viewers.

Data released by comScore, a marketing research company that collects data for many of the Internet’s largest businesses, show that ~183 million people watched online videos during May. (By the way, that’s nearly 85% of the entire U.S. Internet audience.)

With YouTube accounting for ~14.6 BILLION videos served, it translates into 101 videos for the average viewer. The duration of the average online video shown was a little over four minutes.

How pervasive is YouTube? The May comScore stats show that it accounted for far more activity than any other video site, charting ~43% of all videos viewed. Hulu ranked second, with the various Microsoft video sites ranking third.

And the contest isn’t even close: Hulu’s second-place ranking was good for only ~4% of viewership!

The average number of videos seen monthly per viewer as recorded by comScore were as follows:

 YouTube: 101 average number of videos per viewer
 Hulu: 27
 Microsoft video sites: 16
Viacom Digital: 10

If there were any continuing questions as to who is the 500-pound gorilla in online video, these statistics appear to be putting that debate to rest.

Novelty Reigns at Allure Bays (er … Microsoft)

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Microsoft Office 2010 logoMicrosoft SharePoint 2010 logoIn the drive to “engage” customers, some companies are going to pretty great lengths to try something new and novel.

Take Microsoft and its soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office® 2010 and SharePoint® 2010 versions. Burned by the negative customer reaction to some of its earlier introductions (Vista®, for example), the company is trying some new tactics this time around.

Will they succeed? You be the judge.

You can start by visiting www.allurebays.com. This is a “pretend” site put up by Microsoft’s direct marketing agency-of-record (Wunderman), and attempts to generate awareness for the new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 versions without ever mentioning the products by name.

“Allure Bays Corporation” is a fictional company whose name is a riff on the Internet meme all your base are belong to us from an erroneous English translation in a Japanese video game that spread throughout the web in the early 2000s. The bogus site offers infomercial-type videos and other content. Special hidden clues are peppered throughout the site, with content that only alludes to the Office and SharePoint products and their feature/benefits.

What’s going on here? Jerry Hayek, a Microsoft marketing group manager, reported that the company wishes to reach an audience of developers that he characterizes as “jaded”: “It’s a fairly jaded audience. There are a lot of companies that want to talk to them,” he said.

In order to spark visitor engagement, a leaderboard on the “Allure Bays” web site allows registered users to compete for the honor of finding all of the 45 hidden clues on the site. So far, the site has attracted ~25,000 registered users.

“When we look at the developer audience, getting an engagement of 150,000 to 200,000 (spread across several videos) … is a win,” Hayek noted.

What’s the reaction of visitors? If the comments left by viewers of the “Allure Bays” video channel on YouTube are any gauge, it’s mixture of criticism and confusion. To wit:

 “This is one big, expensive, utterly failed attempt of Microsoft to go viral. Please thumbs-down this video.”

 “AYBABTU is a cornerstone of Internet culture. Microsoft appropriating it to hawk the newest version of their bloated Office Suite is loathsome. Anyone up-voting any of these videos should have their Internet license revoked.”

 “I don’t get it … is it supposed to be funny?! Or what the h*ll is going on here?”

“It could be the new TV show like Lost or Fringe or Fantasy Island 2?”

 “WTF.”

Sheri McLeish, an analyst with Forrester Research who covers Microsoft, reported that she found the “Allure Bays” site confusing. “I’m not sure what it’s supposed to do. But maybe there’s something I’m missing.”

In the end, whether or not this initiative will be declared a success depends on how the folks at Wunderman and Microsoft view the results in terms of before/after awareness, audience engagement, and positive product perception.

But the early indicators don’t look all that promising.

Radio Revolution: Pandora’s Box of Musical Delights

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Pandora Internet RadioPandora® Internet radio is one of the more interesting concepts to hit the web. Built on a powerful music recommendation engine known as the Music Genome Project®, it enables a listener to hear streaming music selections chosen on the basis of the musical styles of their favorite bands, performers or songwriters.

If you enjoy the jazz piano style of Marian McPartland, for example, Pandora will stream performances in a similar vein – such as the songs of Beegie Adair and Joe Bushkin. And you can create numerous personalized channels (also called “custom radio stations”) focusing on different styles of music to suit whatever mood or occasion you wish.

It’s an approach to listening remindful of Tom Hanks’ famous quote about that box of chocolates in the movie Forrest Gump: “You never know what you’re going to get.”

… Except with Pandora, you do “kinda-sorta” know what you’re going to get. I’ve been a Pandora listener for over a year now, and I’ve been introduced to musical artists I didn’t know before and probably wouldn’t have stumbled upon otherwise … and I’m the richer for it.

Pandora may be an Internet star today, but it sure didn’t start out that way. The brainchild of Tim Westergren, Pandora labored under difficult circumstances for the better part of a decade. The Music Genome Project took years to build and calibrate, during which time Pandora’s yeomen developers were obliged to work for large stretches at a time without pay.

Also, as with many Internet sites, figuring out an effective business model was challenging — and a barrier to obtaining funding.

Then in 2007, just as Pandora seemed on the verge of breaking out, an action by the Copyright Royalty Board raised Internet radio royalty fees to prohibitive heights, resulting in a court action that was finally settled in July 2009 in a compromise ruling.

Through it all, Pandora managed to survive, and now is close to having 60 million registered users. The Internet site is attracting sufficient advertising dollars to bring in profitable quarters. Revenues topped $50 million in 2009 (~60% goes to paying music royalties), and revenues are on track to double this year.

Always innovating, Pandora is now expanding into TV sets and automobiles as well, although the majority of activity currently comes from computers and a significant minority from mobile phones.

Long-term, Pandora believes the biggest potential rests in automotive. Consider this: Once listeners realize they can simply skip over a song on Pandora they don’t like, it should change forever the way people interact with radio.