Marketing

The Olympic Track and Field Trials are going on here in Eugene, Oregon. The city has been getting ready for these two weeks for a long time, now that it’s finally here it’s exciting to see all those plans being put into action.

Besides the track events themselves, there’s a festival going on at the same time, just adjacent to Hayward Field. This festival is free to everyone. There are huge screens for people to see the events, free music, booths for food, areas for kids and information about everything from environmental concerns to local businesses.

Safeway is sponsoring a pedal tent, called the Track Town Pedal Station, where people can sign up or walk in and pedal a bike to generate power that then is used to power the fan festival’s stage. (make sure to watch the video to get a glimpse of our own Kristen Langham in the green, pedaling to generate some of that power!)

In another part of the festival, long ropes dropped down from trees where kids of all ages could clamor up and down the magnificent tree’s on the University of Oregon campus. This was sponsored by the Pacific Tree Climbing Institute and - according to Timmy, the 4 year old son of our CEO - a huge hit.

Sponsoring local events can be great advertising for your company. You don’t always have to spend big bucks for a huge tent and big giveaways. Sometimes it can be something small, yet powerful. Sometimes it’s just as easy as walking around the event in your company tshirt.

Never underestimate the power of local advertising and showing up at events. Networking and marketing your small town business can sometimes lead to much bigger things.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on June 30th, 2008 | No Comments »

My dearest friend is a web designer. She’s a rather good one too. She works freelance for a company specializing in building websites for real estate companies.

Last night she asked me which site I preferred, Google maps or Yahoo! maps.

“Yahoo has maps??” I asked her in my Yahoo! Instant Messenger window.

“Yes? You didn’t know this?” She replied in kind.

“Evidently not.”

To me, this means a couple of things. One, I’m not as observant as I thought I was. Two, I’m obviously fond of the Google brand kool-aid. And three, Yahoo! has maps!

It’s evidently a very popular map service, too. She showed me a bunch of different ways people have created add-on’s for the Yahoo! map software to make interesting maps for websites. (An apartment building website has a map showing where all the best take-out restaurants in the neighborhood are! That’s brilliant! Sign me up.)

I guess I should have known they had maps, I mean, I am on the Yahoo! front page all the time, Now that I know it’s there I can pick MAPS out of the alphabetical list on the sidebar.

So why couldn’t I remember ever seeing they had maps offered on their website?

Usability on a website is key. Be careful you don’t go overboard. Don’t offer so many products and services that they start to get lost in the jumble. Flashing buttons, pointing arrows, vibrant colors. Sometimes they’re just distracting your customer from what’s important…buying your stuff.

So the fortune cookie for this lesson is this: Remember that often the forest is lost because of all those darn trees.

Simplify.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on June 26th, 2008 | No Comments »

While some people associate business planning narrowly with sales forecasting, or as a means to obtaining investment, it can also be used by companies to assess the impact of changes to the environmental context. This analysis of the future can help inform strategies and tactics in the present, which help to minimise the likelihood of certain outcomes, particularly negative ones happening in the future.

I spotted an advert in a recent edition of Newsweek which resonated strongly with me. The advert was placed by a company that clearly had one eye on the future, had identified a significant threat to a key supplier and had begun to put in place a number of clever activities in an attempt to protect this key supplier.

Who was the key supplier?

It is the humble honey bee, and the company in question is Haagen-Dazs.

Recognising that the ingredients it uses in its ice cream rely heavily on pollination by honey bees, Haagen-Dazs has set up a website which strives to raise awareness of the alarming decline in honey bees. The advert in Newsweek went one step further, consisting of an advert alongside a printed recyclable sheet embedded with wild flower seeds. The instructions suggested you ‘save a bee‘ by planting the page and watering it.

Not only is this a clever campaign that both engages and drives action, but also one that essentially carries no cost for the consumer. In economic terms it is a great solution to a real growing strategic problem, and also a very effective marketing ploy. For ice cream lovers the world over, it is also a very worthy cause!

Alan Gleeson
Palo Alto Software Ltd (U.K.)

Tags: business plan, business planning, ice cream, Marketing, Strategy, suppliers
Posted on June 17th, 2008 | No Comments »

Around the office at Palo Alto, we’ve talked a lot about the Obama campaign, particularly the small-donors fundraising program that radically outperformed the traditional large-donor model followed by the Clinton campaign and could be ushering in a new way of campaigning for national office.

Political preferences aside, the Obama team is interesting to me because their work looks a lot like what my team does: building informative websites that explain what we have to offer, maintaining and optimizing a store site to make it easy for lots of people to spend generally small amounts of money, sending followup emails to encourage additional business, engaging in social networks and Web 2.0 services to build awareness.

This is not groundbreaking stuff in 2008; it’s just groundbreaking the way that the Obama team has been able to apply it effectively (and with an offering that many people find compelling, obviously) to national politics.

If you are interested in reading more about this, the June issue of The Atlantic has a pair of articles about Obama’s online marketing activities and what it might portend for his possible presidency:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/ambinder-obama

Josh Cochrane
Director of Online Marketing
Palo Alto Software

Posted on June 15th, 2008 | No Comments »

While Palo Alto Software is admittedly pretty focused on software, we do have a few books available. We’ve shared the free ebook, Hurdle: The Book on Business Plans before. But we haven’t yet mentioned our other book, On Target: The Book on Marketing Plans which we have available on DocStoc for people to read for free.

Practical resources to write a marketing plan are difficult to find. On Target: The Book on Marketing Plans offers an excellent solution. On Target takes you through the process of writing an effective marketing plan from the initial concept to full implementation.

On Target assists you in gathering marketing data, establishing your product position, forecasting sales, testing your assumptions, and making tactical decisions to support your strategy and accomplish your goals. This comprehensive approach is a great formula for your marketing success.

Hurdle and On Target are authored by Tim Berry, founder and President of Palo Alto Software.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on June 13th, 2008 | No Comments »

Or: how not to use canned email responses.

I like Wesabe, the free online service for tracking personal expenses, but it doesn’t have direct integration with my credit union. This is not surprising: it’s a not-huge regional credit union, and I would have been really impressed to have found it on the list for a relatively young web app.

To get my financial data into Wesabe, though, that means I have to go to the credit union’s poorly designed website, export a file, and then import it into Wesabe.

Mint.com, a Wesabe competitor, won last year’s TechCrunch startup contest and has gotten a lot of good press, so I gave it a try recently. Unfortunately, Mint can’t interact with my credit union either, and unlike Wesabe, it appears not to support manual data transfers. We small credit union customers may just be SOL.

That answer surprised me a little — there must be a lot of us, right? — so I tried to follow up with the company. The communication thread that ensued is a good cautionary tale about the use and abuse of canned email responses. Here’s the blow by blow:

• I sign up for Mint and log in. So far, so good.
• I try to add my credit union and discover it is not on the list.
• Mint sends me an email all about how great Mint is, citing the Wall Street Journal so I’ll be sure to believe them.
• I reply to the message, saying that my credit union is not on the list and asking if that means I can’t use the service. If that is the case, I ask to be removed from the email list. (As an iPhone-less Verizon customer, I can’t take any more news about the greatness of other people’s toys.) My message goes to a generic inbox: feedback@mint.com.
• Mint sends me an auto response, generically thanking me for my email. “We love hearing from you, whether you’re sharing a great testimonial or something we’d better fix.”
• Three days later, a Mint tech sends me a message. “Hi, Josh. Please use the directions below to cancel your account…” (Have I just been fired as a customer?) The message signs off, “Thank you for trying out Mint!”
• I reply, pointing out that I didn’t ask to cancel my account. I just asked whether I could still use the service.
• Finally, at this point, an actual human being (hey, Damon) responds with a custom-written-just-for-me message that explains my specific situation in a way that is unambiguous and actually answers my question. It’s not the answer I hoped for — alas, I can’t try Mint without switching banks — but at least I know where I stand now.

I don’t mean to bash Mint here, just to point out that sadly this is a common customer experience. It reminds me of chatting with Eliza, the old CP/M-era app that tried to impersonate a psychologist using reiterated text and boilerplate replies.

Undoubtedly, email templates are a great tool. We were happy to build them into our email management solution, Email Center Pro. Message templates make it easy for teams to deliver consistent messages to common questions, and they reduce the amount of time it takes to send those replies.

But like every other sort of automation, they need to be deployed sensibly, and with a clear understanding of the customer experience, lest they unintentionally mistreat your customers and tarnish your brand.

Josh Cochrane
Director of Online Marketing
Palo Alto Software

Posted on June 11th, 2008 | 5 Comments »

InfoMania is a half hour show on Current TV and you can see more of their irreverent twists on today’s news, information and politics there.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on June 9th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Ask any teenager how he keeps in touch with his friends and he’ll spin out his Facebook/MySpace/Twitter account for you. But most likely not his e-mail.

More and more young people are communicating via their MySpace pages instead of email. This kind of trend suggests that the landscape of how we market to consumers will be changing drastically in the next several years.

Does this mean all businesses should run out right now and invest in those social media networks, dropping their older, more traditional modes of marketing?

Well, no. Not exactly.

According to a recent survey, nearly three-quarters of adult e-mail users in North America still use e-mail as their preferred communication for business.

While the other channels are gaining ground, e-mail is still far and away the preferred choice of current consumers.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on June 2nd, 2008 | No Comments »

On the Freakonomics blog there’s an interesting conversation happening about “The Perils of Free Coffee”. Author Stephen Dubner tells two stories of free coffee offers that had the opposite effect than was probably intended.

There are, of course, a lot of different kinds of “free.” Giving away a free razor or a free computer printer in order to lock a customer into buying your razor blades or printer cartridges is one model; giving away free merchandise as a pure marketing play is another.

The comments are filled with more stories of people turning away from the “free” offer to go across the street to take advantage of a paid option - all to avoid standing in line.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on May 16th, 2008 | No Comments »

I don’t think a company starts out to give bad service. They don’t generally have a space in their business plan that says, “Do things really badly”. I’m sure, well mostly sure, that most companies start out wanting to be the best out there and produce the best product and be the top of their field.

So where does this all go wrong?

Over the past several weeks my housemate and I have been trying to find a new lawn service. Our old lawn service, aka our lawnmower, broke - so we’re trying to find a company that can come out every other week and mow the lawn, pull the weeds and in general stop us from killing our rose bushes.

You would think this would be a fairly easy task to accomplish. You would be wrong.

We have, to date, called 9 different lawn companies.

6 failed to show up to evaluate our lawn,

2 came out - gave outrageous bids and never returned our calls and

1 came out, actually did the work, broke our window, left the garden door open so the dog could get out and then, surprising no one, never came back.

So we’re back to square one, looking for someone who will actually come out and talk to us about our lawn.

I don’t understand why this has been so difficult. We picked all of the businesses out of the yellow pages, I’m guessing each one of them wants to have a successful and prosperous business, and yet I couldn’t and wouldn’t recommend a single one of them to anyone who asked. Why?

Because they didn’t show up.

Half the battle is won right there. Showing up, showing that you care enough for someone’s business that you’re there to pick up the phone, there to make the bid, there to answer questions and in general are available to your customer.

Start and run your business with consistency, dedication, pride in a job well done.

And if you have a recommendation for a good lawn service in Springfield, Oregon? Let me know!

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on May 6th, 2008 | No Comments »