New Video Shows Microsoft “Assistant” Cortana In Action

Microsoft will be introducing its Siri and Google Now/Voice competitor Cortana with Windows 8.1 in April. The new “intelligent assistant” will eventually be available cross-platform, although launching on Lumia Phones.

The name Cortana comes from a character in the game Halo. It was originally thought that Cortana would look like her character in the game (see image right). However it now appears “she” won’t have a face or a body.

Cortana is intended to help users discover and search for information as well as providing Google Now like personalization and “predictive search” capabilities. The problem with the latter is that Microsoft doesn’t have as much data as Google does to power anticipatory search and recommendations.

For that reason, upon set up, Cortana takes users through a battery of personalization questions. The blog UnleashThePhones posted a video (below) of Cortana in action. Among the questions Cortana asks users are the following:

• What are a couple of the most enjoyable parts of your everyday evenings?
• When you think about food, what’s most important to you these days?
• What are two of your main motivations for going out to an event/activity?

Microsoft is also licensing Foursquare location data to help further enrich the Cortana experience.

Reportedly behind Cortana will be sophisticated machine learning and Microsoft’s/Bing’s “Satori” technology. Cortana will supposedly enable “deep personalization” of device experiences from mobile to the PC to Xbox.

However to be more than simply a “Siri impersonator” or “me too” product, Cortana will need to obviously outperform Siri and Google Now. That remains to be seen.

It appears that Cortana will in a way compete with Bing. It’s not clear however whether Cortana is intended to become the dominant UI for “search” on Microsoft devices or whether it will operate more like a Google Now product that includes Bing search but offers different use cases.

Twitter Moves Beyond The Tweet, Shares First “Impressions” Metrics For Oscars

As the race for second screen dominance continues, Twitter is changing how it reports its own TV-related reach.

In a new blog post, Twitter says tweets about Sunday night’s Oscar Awards had 3.3 billion impressionsworldwide in the 12-hour period from 5:00 pm ET Sunday until 5:00 am ET Monday.

That’s “billion” with a B.

This is the first time Twitter has revealed a total impressions figure, and it’s a change from Twitter’s typical reporting of tweet activity. In fact, just a few hours after the Oscars ended, Twitter postedthat there were 14.7 million tweets about the awards telecast, and 17.1 million if you include the red carpet and post-Awards activity.

What Are Twitter “Impressions”?

The new impressions figure is obviously a lot different than a count of tweets. Twitter says impressions are “how many times Tweets are displayed to users”, which makes it something akin to page views.

Twitter says the impressions figure includes views that are generated when news outlets and others embed tweets on their websites. So, when someone like CNN takes Ellen Degeneres’ record-breaking tweet and embeds it on their site, all of those tweet views on CNN.com are counting in Twitter’s impressions count.

Why Tweet Impressions Matter

It’s no secret that Twitter has millions of lurkers — people that have accounts but don’t actually post any tweets. So, from Twitter’s perspective, the mere counting of tweets posted about an event isn’t really the best indicator of Twitter’s reach. And reach is what matters when it comes to attracting brands and advertisers.

Twitter and Facebook are battling hard for advertiser, media and user attention in a race to decide which platform is the one used most as a second screen (television being the first screen). This is especially true when it comes to live events.

Ellen’s tweet is a great example of this. It earned attention as the most retweeted tweet ever(currently about 3.2 million retweets), but as we reported after the Oscars, it was also enormously viral on Facebook with about 2.1 million “likes” at the moment.

Twitter’s new impressions figure puts both of those numbers to shame. The company says Ellen’s tweet was really seen about 32.8 million times.

So, think about impressions as a matter of Twitter trying to turn the dial even louder in proclaiming itself as the second screen king.

Facebook, the ball is in your court now.

Postscript: Some extra info to pass along… Twitter tells us that its count of impressions only includes Twitter-owned properties like Twitter.com and the official Twitter apps. It doesn’t include impressions in third-party apps. So Twitter’s numbers are at least a little bit undercounted — likely not enough to change the 3.3 billion estimate, but something to keep in mind when tweet impressions are discussed in the future.

Live @ SMX West: Small Company, Big Results

Small businesses have always faced unique challenges when it comes to online success. That’s even truer today, when the marketing landscape often seems to be friendlier to big brands. But creative small enterprises use agility to create opportunities leveraging search marketing, social media, email marketing and other disciplines.

At the Small Company, Big Results session at SMX West, you’ll hear about the strategies and tactics that small companies have used to find big success online. For example:

• How a commercial B2B manufacturing company wanted to advertise varying product lines to varying audiences but was hindered by the inability to use product listing ads. Yet the solution they devised ultimately drove 31% of total leads at a cost-per-lead 52% less than search campaigns.
• How another small business used existing creative content to gain traffic, rank, and ROI in an online campaign, and then with a bit of out-of-the-box thinking repurposed that content for use in offline campaigns at very little additional expense.
• How one company took an outdated website that enjoyed excellent rankings but lacked conversions, and reworked it into completely new site that saw no drop in traffic and increased conversions exponentially.

Small Company; Big Results is one of more than 60 sessions at SMX West, March 11-13 in San Jose, the three-day conference devoted to all aspects of search, online and social media marketing. 

Creating Content For Your Users That Will Also Get You Links

When you’re crafting content, you obviously want to create something that your users want to see; but, that’s not always as easy as it sounds. How can you tell what they want? How do you know what they need?

Perhaps just as important is this question: how can you craft something that appeals specifically to them but also appeals to a broader group (like potential customers)?

Find Out What Your Audience Wants

Ask Your Customers. If you send out an email newsletter, ask them to contact you and share ideas of what they’d like to see on the site. Ask them on Facebook and Twitter. Ask them in person if you can. Ask them in a blog post. Ask them on your site like in the example below, which is a great little popup on BourbonandBoots.com.

Do Some Research. Dig into your analytics and see what keeps your visitors’ attention the longest. If most people who hit your blog post about “Top 10 Vegetarian Lunches For Kids” spend 5 minutes there while most people who hit your “Top 10 Fast Food Lunches For Kids” immediately bounce, maybe your users would like to see more vegetarian posts.

There could be many different reasons why this would happen, of course, and naturally it doesn’t indicate — at least not by itself — that you need to only write posts about vegetarian food. Maybe you’ve built some links with misleading anchor text that’s driving visitors to the fast food post, for example. Maybe people finding that post through organic search do read it without immediately leaving.

That’s why I say you need to dig in, as a quick glance isn’t going to give you definitives if you don’t consider the “why” part of the equation.

Think About Offline Methods. I have a subscription to a monthly magazine that does a yearly survey to see what their readers like and don’t like. This year, they’ve decided to add an entirely new magazine section based on user feedback. If you have the ability to get offline feedback like this, do so.

Go See Which Of These Ideas Your Competition Has Implemented. One-up them with a better version. If they created a video series that shows you how to fix a dishwasher and that’s all they did, go create a step by step tutorial with text and images for the ones of us who hate watching videos, even if they are informative.

If they haven’t done a video, do one. If they have written an article that is nothing but opinion, write a fact-based piece. If everything written about a topic is dry, write something funny.

Look At What’s Being Shared On Social Media. What terms and lingo are people using? Maybe you say “do it yourself” but everyone else uses “DIY.” Do a Twitter search for some relevant topics and look at what’s getting lots of shares. See what your competitors are tweeting. See what they’re doing on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.

Use Alerts! I certainly do harp on these enough, I know, but I really do think that for a busy person, there is no better way to keep your eyes on everything than using (FREE) alerts.

Google has their own Google Alerts but I much prefer Talkwalker’s Alerts, and they just released a free app that works with Hootsuite, so that’s a very promising way to save time. If your site is in the local wedding photography niche, set up related alerts so you can see what other local wedding photographers are doing.

So now that you’ve found out what your users want to see, how can you craft that content so that it appeals specifically to them, but generally to a larger audience? Here are a few easy ways:

Think Locally, But Create For A Global Audience

If you’re using a local slant on something, keep that in there, certainly, but add some information about how it’s relevant for a broader region.

Example: you run a local mobile dog grooming business where your usual thing is to park at ten major spots in your small town and have customers bring their dogs to you. You create a local app that tells customers where the current closest parked location is to them, and if they check in there on Foursquare, they get 10% off.

You write a post about this app and tell the story of why you decided to work at these locations which happens to include the fact that many of them are near popular local parks. Since you take a vacation to a new state every year, you decide to profile other similar businesses located in those states.

In this piece about the local app, you link to each of those business profile pages that you’ve created on your site.

Don’t Forget About Your Existing Customers/Audience!

One thing that really bugs me is that when you’re someone’s customer, the only time you’re offered a discount or coupon is if you complain or threaten to leave.

Some businesses are brilliant at keeping their existing customers happy, of course, but many others forget that you have to work to keep people loyal. If you’re able to give new customers a one-time 15% off coupon when they sign up, go ahead and email a free shipping code to your customers who haven’t ordered in a few months.

Find ones who’ve been with you for more than a year and offer them a discount on their next purchase. Don’t just focus on getting new business; focus on keeping the business that you have.

Focus On Your Niche But Recognize Its Appeal To Others

Obviously, some sites are dedicated to specific demographics; but, what applies to them usually also applies to others. If you run a site dedicated to Latina culture and beauty then, of course, you’ll be attracting readers from other cultures, so it would be ridiculous not to take advantage of that fact without losing your focus.

I have a serious addiction to Latin American food and subscribe to a magazine geared toward Latinas mainly for the recipes, but I also like reading something besides the usual. I’m not their target audience, but I’m definitely consuming what they produce.

Even the most amazing content won’t generate links if it’s not shared, so don’t forget the importance of getting your pieces out there. If you’ve asked your email subscribers for feedback and you implement their ideas, let them know, rather than just hoping they’ll follow up themselves. Use social media to get your content in front of people rather than hoping they’ll happen upon it.

Last of all, I’d advise taking a look at these 75 content starters for any industry, which is a fantastic reference to get you started in case you’re having trouble figuring out what to write about.

It does get easier, but there can be a lot of writer’s block and panic at first. If you can’t get started writing something, write the middle or the end, and work your way backward. We’ve had some link builders who say they can’t possibly write content because they’re not good at it. However, once they actually do it, almost all of them are naturals.

Why Spending Big On Extraordinary Content Marketing Is A Good Bet

There is more to ranking for your target keywords than just writing great blog posts and then hoping you will eventually rank for what you want to.

Many marketers that have found great success by spending thousands of dollars creating exclusive tools, content and videos. Though the tools themselves aren’t set up to adequately monetize their use by online visitors, thus leading to an overall loss when it comes to comparing investment versus direct revenue, they’ve still been a good investment for marketing purposes.

One good example of this is Neil Patel, who blogs over at QuickSprout and founded KISSmetrics. He has written several blog posts about how his significant investment in tools has generated traffic and worldwide popularity for him and his brand, but have cost him thousands of dollars (over $45,000 and counting for his QuickSprout University and another $45,000 for his website analyzer tool).

Even though this is a significant investment for tools and content that are then given away for free, the exposure that Neil continues to receive has helped him continue to invest in companies and do what he loves — speaking and consulting.

Content: Infographics

Spending large amounts on content results large returns in traffic, backlinks and leads. For example, Neil has also disclosed costs and benefits for visual content for KISSmetrics.

• Cost: $600 per infographic, 47 in the last 2 years at $600 each = $28,200.
• Results directly from infographics:
  • 2,512,596 visitors
  • 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains
  • 41,359 tweets
  • 20,859 Facebook likes

Neil states that it would have cost him over $800,000 to get the above traffic numbers through sponsored tweets and traffic. Instead of going this route, he chose to pay the expense for thecreation of content instead of solely on the promotion of it. This strategy has worked out tremendously well for KISSMetrics and Neil.

In fact, Neil turns down over $1m in queries and leads each year from companies wanting consulting or advertising and sponsored content on QuickSprout. Being able to turn down potential income in exchange for having your ideal career and business may make the initial large investment in content creation worth it, because it can lead to demanding a higher retainer over a larger period of time.

Below are the following areas that heavy investment can lead to higher overall exposure, both in the search engines and throughout your industry.

Content: Tools

As mentioned above, Neil created his website analyzer tool for over $45,000. Creating unique, high-value free tools has many benefits, the best being inbound links and referral traffic. For instance, Neil mentions the success that Moz has had with its free Open Site Explorer tool, which allows users to compare their websites with others as well as receive a copy of their link profile.

The referral traffic that Moz receives from the Open Site Explorer website to pages on its main site, Moz.com, are large and steady. While many of their competitors charge for similar tools (and users pay for them), making this tool free has helped Moz maintain one of the best reputations online for search engine marketing. It also serves as a good introduction to Moz’s paid suite of tools, which charge users a monthly cost.

If you build a great, high-value tool for free, user trust will increase, thus increasing the likelihood that users will want to try your paid tools or services, as well. After all, if your free tools are extraordinary, your paid tools must be out of this world.

Besides potential leads and referral traffic, free tools are also long-standing linkbait that bloggers and other websites will continue to link to, as long as you provide the tool.

Content: Education

Neil launched QuickSprout University, which was a suite of free content and videos that helped users learn all about online marketing and beyond.

By investing in a useful and thorough education portal or suite, you are not only putting more content online, but you are also setting your company up to be seen as an expert in your industry.

Users are more likely to trust companies that have a “university” of content rather than one that has a website that just explains their services.

Content: Long-Form

Another type of education investment that can pay off in more leads and recurring revenue are e-books and other long-form content. One example is Kindle books, which are a great way to gain exposure and reach a new audience, as Amazon is the largest e-commerce search engine in the world. According to Forbes, Forrester Research found that 33% of all users start their product search on Amazon versus a traditional search engine.

Other long-form content, like webinars, white papers and exclusive studies can also be offered to customers as an incentive for email list sign-up, as linkbait and to increase credibility.

Unique, exhaustive content that is published on a topic which hasn’t been covered much (either because it’s so new or so extensive that no one else has had a chance to cover it yet) will get you higher rankings much faster than another piece on something several others have covered before.

Neil Patel’s long-form guides, on “link building” and “content marketing” both currently rank in the top 10 on Google for those terms.

Content: Video

Video is similar to educational and long-form content and often even covers or adds onto existing written content. It is worthwhile to invest in high quality production tools and staff for video as just with website design, users subconsciously evaluate a company’s overall worth depending on the quality of what they output online.

Producing high-quality video is not only costly, but very time-consuming (due to editing and reshoots). However, video continues to grow online. According to Digiday, online video now accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic, and Cisco estimates that globally, online video traffic will be 55% of all consumer internet traffic in 2016. Because of all the online content that people are exposed to each day, video is an easily digested medium that many companies aren’t taking advantage of properly.

When it comes down to it, if you are going to spend money to promote yourself online, do it right. Spend the money to make something you can be proud of and that actually helps people.

Don’t copy what others are doing — make it mind-blowing, and people will respond. While the initial costs can be overwhelming, the long-standing payoff in credibility, leads and referral traffic will be worth the cost, especially if you scale back on the costs associated with the marketing methods you are using that aren’t working.

Content Promotion

This is where social media marketing comes in big. Creating content is only half the battle.

Don’t spend big on content and then cheap out on the social promotion because the “build it and they will come” mentality doesn’t work. Check out my post on The Essential Three-Pronged Approach to Content Promotion to learn how to better conduct this step.

Microsoft Board Chair: Company Culture Must Change

Tech journalism tends to focus on “who’s winning,” who’s buying whom and new company products. Rarely is there much discussion of organizational culture. But that’s often the hidden “X variable” behind success or failure.

In a candid statement to Fortune, Microsoft Board Chairman John Thompson likened Microsoft to IBM 25 years ago and acknowledged that the company culture must change now that the “Windows monopoly has run out”:

I think one of the things IBM learned was when their monopoly ran out and they had to compete with a bunch of smaller, more agile companies, they needed to have a different rate and pace of change. And Lou Gerstner coming into IBM certainly brought about a sense of urgency that some would argue the company didn’t really have at that time. And clearly the monopoly was gone, and clearly the market was loaded with a host of new competitors in almost every segment they were in. It required a leader who was willing to say, “Here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s what we’re not going to do. And here are the behaviors that will be rewarded, and here are the ones that will be punished.” Over time, that changed IBM’s culture.

He’s right. The question is whether new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has the vision, clarity and “cojones” (as they say) to execute against it.

In one of his first public moves as CEO, Nadella and Microsoft announced several leadership changes. Here they are in a nutshell:

• Former Skype CEO, Microsoft EVP and one-time CEO candidate Tony Bates is leaving
• Tami Reller, Microsoft’s EVP of Marketing is out; Chris Capossela will be the new CMO. Reller had been opposite Mark Penn
• Mark Penn, alleged source of the largely unsuccessful “Scroogled” anti-Google campaign, will now be EVP, Chief Strategy Officer

Penn had been Microsoft “Corporate Vice President for Strategic and Special Projects” and EVP of advertising and strategy.  Originally a pollster and PR executive, Penn later ran Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign.

Reportedly Penn is a polarizing figure. Fairly or unfairly he was blamed by some for the Clinton campaign’s demise in 2008. A piece in BusinessWeek describes Nadella’s challenge in managing Penn:

The trick for Nadella will be finding a way to extract Penn’s best advice while keeping his worst impulses in check. In other words, to avoid the mistakes Clinton made. 

If “Scroogled” is representative of Penn’s thinking it doesn’t augur well for his longevity in Redmond. That, combined with the coming 2016 presidential cycle, suggests that Penn will not remain at Microsoft beyond 2015.

Bing Saves, Search Bookmarking Feature, Now Public Beta

A month ago, Microsoft started testing a new search feature named Bing Saves. This feature enabled searchers to save URLs and searches to their personal Bing/Microsoft account, in order to build an index of their own saved searches.

That feature seems to now be available as public beta for anyone who wants to try it. To try it yourself, go to bing.com/saves and you should see this dashboard:

You will also see a link in the top Bing navigation that says “SAVES beta.”

There is a disclaimer on the footer of the page that reads, “This feature is an experiment. Saved results may not be available later.”

Digital Marketing Disaster? Hope You Have An Emergency Plan!

With 54 inches of snow so far in New York this year, we have officially broken into the top ten worst winters on record. It’s been one snow emergency after another. Enough already! That said, being prepared has definitely made this harsh winter much easier to handle.

The same goes for marketing disasters. Whether it’s a PR crisis, a search algorithm update or a major technology change, a marketing disaster can strike at any moment. Yet, few marketers are prepared for it. Instead, the response often looks like this:

…which is usually soon followed by something like this:

But you can do better than that. Much like FEMA recommends for other types of disasters, you need an emergency plan in place for potential marketing disasters — and in fact, many emergency preparedness tips are applicable to marketing disasters as well. Below is a quick list to help you get prepared for a marketing crisis. As a bonus, I’ve also thrown in some tips on how to prepare for other types of disasters!

Disaster Emergency Plan	Marketing Emergency Plan
Meet with household members to talk about disaster preparedness. It’s important to be ready for disaster BEFORE it strikes. Meet with your family/household members in advance. Discuss the dangers of fire, severe weather, earthquakes and other emergencies. Explain how to respond to each, and put a plan in place. Put together an emergency kit.	Meet with your team to talk about marketing disaster preparedness. When a marketing disaster happens, the disruption it causes can quickly cause chaos. It’s critical to be ready for a marketing crisis BEFORE it hits. Discuss how the group will respond to various marketing disasters like a CEO scandal, an offensive employee tweet, a product recall, etc. Be sure to also talk about important issues that could cause a marketing crisis such as a search algorithm change, SEO penalty, website outage, etc.
Discuss potential for power outages and injuries during a disaster situation. When disaster strikes, the electricity often goes out. It gets dark. And cold. And dangerous. Be prepared with candles, matches, flash lights, batteries, extra layers of clothing, blankets, and first aid supplies.	Discuss potential “power outages” with your team. A business can quickly have a potential marketing disaster on its hands from the sudden loss of a team member. Have a plan to deal with the situation if an employee leaves the company unexpectedly. You never know who might be considering a career change, a relocation, or taking time off to focus on family. Discuss what to do if an employee takes an unexpected leave of absence due to injury or illness, and how you will back-fill that role temporarily.
Make sure your family knows what to do. During a disaster situation, it is often necessary to shut off utilities at the main connections. Show family members where the water, gas, and electricity connections are, how to turn them off, and when it is necessary. Practice accessing these utilities in the dark. You might need a wrench or pliers to turn off the utilities.	Cross-train your team so everyone is ready. When a marketing disaster strikes, you can’t afford to let the situation get worse because a key team member is unavailable to do their part. Be sure to cross train employees so they are familiar with their colleagues’ core job skills. Establish a password protocol that ensures multiple individuals have important access codes. That way, if the main contact is unavailable, the backup can help you access important tools or information.
Post emergency contact numbers near telephones. When disaster strikes, it is important to have emergency contact numbers immediately available (beyond 911).	Collect multiple contact points for each team member. When marketing disasters happen, chances are you’ll need to communicate with the whole team. But these situations don’t always happen on a weekday, so be sure you can reach your team members in a variety of ways. Collect mobile numbers, email addresses, and instant messenger screen names in case you need them in an emergency.
Turn on the radio for emergency information. During a disaster situation, you need to know what is happening and how the situation is evolving. A radio may be your only source of information in an emergency. Be sure to have a radio on hand, and instruct family members to turn it on for important information. Remember to have plenty of batteries for the radio and flash lights during an emergency. And conserve their use.	Make sure your team uses various alert devices during a marketing crisis. When a marketing disaster strikes, it is critical to know how the situation is developing. Monitoring is key. Be sure to set up Google alerts, social alerts, and search ranking alerts for the team to stay on top of issues involved with your marketing crisis. Consider using a tool like ifttt.com to route alerts across different media to various team members. Be sure to develop an initial list of terms for your alerts that are potentially associated with your crisis. Create additional terms and alerts throughout the crisis as needed.
Take a basic first aid and CPR class. When disaster strikes, people are often injured and medical help is not immediately accessible. It is important to be able to provide first aid and to be able resuscitate someone. During an emergency disaster situation, you could make the difference between someone living or dying. Sign-up for a first aid course. Get CPR training.	Practice for a marketing disaster. You never know when a marketing disaster might strike. But when it does, you need to act immediately. You can’t afford to waste valuable time. You must be prepared for the unexpected. That means practice! Plan to have a quarterly mock marketing disaster scenario to work through with your team. Be sure to cover the situation from numerous angles. Write down the recommended response. You might want to refer to it during a real marketing crisis.
Have a supply of clean drinking water. You won’t survive long without drinking water, so be sure to have a supply of it on hand. Plan for one gallon of water per person, per day. Store water in sealed, unbreakable containers. Identify the storage date and replace it every six months.	Protect your point of sale. Your business won’t survive long without sales. During a marketing crisis, it is important that your point of sale — typically a website — remains open for business. Run nightly backups of your site, and store it on a separate server. Replicate your database on a secondary server. Use a CDN to ensure authorized users can access a cached copy of your site from anywhere in the world. Run load testing simulations to ensure servers can cope with traffic surges and denial-of-service attacks.
Have a supply of non-perishable and canned food on hand. If a disaster strikes, you may need to rely on canned goods and non-perishable food items. Keep a minimum of a three-day supply of non-perishable food items on hand. Be sure to have infant formula available if needed. Don’t forget to have a manual can opener available.	Have a supply of “non-perishable content” ready. Content is your marketing food — and you can’t risk running out of it during a marketing disaster. Even if you are too busy dealing with the crisis at hand, you still need to have that content available. Fortunately, you can stock up on it in advance. You can create “evergreen” content — material that is not time sensitive and will always be relevant. Create a small stockpile of articles, videos, images and tweets that you can fall back on if you run low on the resources to create new content for a few weeks. Need ideas? Think about broad topics. People will always be interested in ways to feel better, be more efficient, more comfortable, healthier, richer, and better looking.
Have a first aid kit and prescription medications. When disaster strikes, people are often injured. It is important to have a first aid kit on hand so you can treat them. Be sure household members know where it is located and how to use it. During a disaster, pharmacies may be closed and/or you might not be able to get to one. Be sure your first aid kit includes regular prescription medications for household members.	Have the right marketing tools available. When things go wrong, you need emergency marketing tools to help you identify the problems and stop things from getting worse. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools give critical insight into what’s happening on your site. Conductor’s SearchLight orBrightEdge can help you gauge the impact on organic rankings and links. Enterprise startups likeBottlenose can help decipher social activity.
Have cash on hand! When disaster strikes, electrical systems can go down. That means you won’t be able to use your credit and debit cards. Be sure to have emergency cash on hand in case you need gas, food, water, or emergency travel.	Save some resources for marketing emergencies. Because you never know when a marketing disaster might hit, try to create a budget safety net for these situations. Ideally, set aside a little bit of money from each marketing channel. That way you’ll have some resources available in case something unexpected comes up. For example, a product recall may require new content, or even the development of a new microsite very quickly.
Have a security plan. Lots of frightening things can happen during an emergency situation that you need to be prepared for. This includes things that could put your personal safety at risk, such as rioting, looting, theft, and attacks. While you won’t find this item on FEMA’s list, it is important to have some sort of self-defense available during an emergency disaster situation. Hand-to-hand combat skills such as Krav Maga or Kickboxing can be handy in just about any situation. Lethal and non-lethal forms of self-defense such as pepper spray can also be useful during an extended disaster situation.	Have a security plan. A marketing disaster can come in all forms, including a security breach — something that is happening all too often today. For example, Kickstarter recently reported a security breech with stolen passwords and user information. And two months earlier, millions of passwords were stolen from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn through a sophisticated malware attack. To help prevent this from happening to your business, frequently update your social media passwords, and hold security training to make sure that employees are using secure passwords. As marketers, look at how some of the bigger companies (like Kickstarter) addressed the situation, so you have a plan in place in case your site gets breeched. As an Internet user, be sure to use a password manager like Dashlane to protect yourself when your information is stolen from sites you use.
Be prepared for the long haul. Disaster preparedness information indicates that you should try to be ready for three days. However, many disasters last much longer. Storm power outages, can last a week or more, especially in rural areas. A well-prepared home should be ready to survive for several weeks without electricity, gas, or heat.	Be prepared for the long haul. Some marketing disasters, such as a security breach, are relatively short lived. But bigger marketing disasters, such as JC Penney’s failed turnaround attempt last year, can linger on for years if not fixed. Marketing teams need to brace themselves for the possibility of ongoing challenges by adopting a lean marketing approach. This means thinking like a start-up. During a long-term marketing crisis, you may have to do away with the big budget TV ads and expensive enterprise tools. Instead, you might need to focus on grass-root marketing campaigns and use free tools. Recovery should come through innovation and creativity, not from throwing more money at tired tactics.

Hopefully, there won’t be many more winter storms to deal with this year — but online marketing disasters can happen at any time. Be smart; get prepared. Think about worst case marketing scenarios and build a plan of action. When the algorithm shifts, budgets get cut or your site goes down, you’ll be ready — and you’ll emerge a stronger, wiser marketer.

Everything You Need To Know About Gmail’s Auto-Unsubscribe

Gmail recently announced the addition of an auto-unsubscribe feature to promotional messages, making it easier for Gmail users to unsubscribe from messages they no longer want to receive.

On most promotional messages with unsubscribe options, Gmail users are seeing a more prominent link at the top of the email beside the sender’s name, allowing them to unsubscribe without looking around for the typical place at the bottom of the message.

Marketers have asked if this is a good thing or bad thing for them, and others have asked how they need to get it implemented. In this post, I’ll explain why this feature is important and the steps needed to get the auto-unsubscribe feature enabled.

Gmail’s Auto-Unsubscribe: What Is It?

If you look at the from address below, you’ll notice a link on the right hand side clearly stating “Unsubscribe.” Gmail users can click on this and be unsubscribed from future mailings. Gmail warns their users that this can take up to a few days, but this is entirely dependent on how fast the unsubscribes are processed.

Why You Want To Make It Easy For Your Subscribers To Leave

Some email marketers think this adds insult to injury coming right after the release of Gmail’s tabbed inbox. The naysayers are worried that not only are people ignoring email delivered to the promotional tab, now they will unsubscribe in droves, driving subscription numbers even lower.

While this is possible, it’s highly unlikely, and in fact, will likely drive complaint rates lower for brands which will then improve deliverability and increase inbox placement rates.

By giving subscribers a no-hassle way to unsubscribe, they will be less likely to mark an email as spam. Additionally, since the link will be a trusted link provided by Gmail, the subscriber will be more likely to click on the link rather than ignoring future messages. And, as most know, Gmail is using engagement as a means to determine future inbox placement, so having messages be ignored may be more detrimental than an unsubscribe.

Long story short, this is a win for marketers, and every marketer should look at implementing the auto-unsubscribe if they haven’t already.

How To Implement Gmail’s Auto-Unsubscribe Feature

Gmail’s unsubscribe feature is based on the list-unsubscribe header. The list-unsubscribe header is an x-header, which means it appears in the email header, but isn’t visible within email clients.

As a result, email providers like Gmail can use this as a way to create an action. The list-unsubscribe header can appear as an email address, a website, or both. See the example below of how that would appear with in email header. In this example, I’m using both the MAILTO and the URL versions.

From: tom@marketingland.com

Subject: We need to implement this list-unsubscribe thing

Date: February 22, 2014 12:16:59 PM MST

To: joe@somedomain.com

List-Unsubscribe: ,

Based on our own testing, it appears that Gmail will act on the last specified function, so in the example above, it would ask the user if they wanted to visit the URL to unsubscribe.

If only the MAILTO version was listed, or if it appeared last, an email message would be sent seamlessly behind the scenes to the address given. Gmail has stated that they prefer the MAILTO version and have suggested they may move away from the URL altogether in the future.

If you are using multiple unsubscribe email addresses, Gmail recommends fewer than five variations. Additionally, if you do implement the auto-unsubscribe feature, ensure that you are actually removing people from your list.

If it’s found that you are continuing to mail to a user after they click on the Unsubscribe link, deliverability to all users, and not just that one user who clicked on the unsubscribe link, can suffer as a result.

One Last Step

Implementing the list-unsubscribe header is a major step in users’ seeing the auto-unsubscribe feature in your emails. However, in some cases, senders may still find that the unsubscribe link isn’t present.

Gmail has indicated that the unsubscribe link will only appear for senders with positive reputations, meaning that spammers and phishers won’t be able to abuse this feature and use it as a way to validate if an email address is real or not.

That means if you’re starting to mail from a new IP addresses or from new domains, it’s likely the unsubscribe feature won’t appear until you’ve established a positive sending history. If you have an established sending history but your recipients aren’t seeing the link, it’s likely you have a reputation problem, and you can read my previous article on steps needed to improve your reputation at Gmail.

If you do nothing else, implement and test the unsubscribe feature to see if it has a meaningful impact on your deliverability without causing a decline in your list. If it does, you can always remove the x-header if you find it hurts rather than helps, but I doubt that will occur in any case.