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In the first part of this little series, I talked a bit about the importance of relevance. In that post, I said that one way to focus on relevance for the recipient of an e-newsletter (really, any marketing message) is to think about the conversation going on inside their head and then trying to match that conversation.

It’s an old idea really, one that’s sometimes called “message match” in other contexts (ie, if they click a Google Adword with a certain headline or offer, repeat the headline or offer on the landing page). Others have called this approach “frame of mind” marketing, in which you try to figure out the prospect’s frame of mind before you put together your message.

Still others, like Dan Kennedy, call this the MARKET part of the MARKET-MESSAGE-MEDIA approach…in other words, get to know your market’s needs, desires, fears, hopes, and what have you, and the messaging part becomes really easy. The media buy then becomes a natural outgrowth of the process, instead of the primary focus (which you still see in the industry, sad but true).

In any case, you’ve done your homework and you now know something about your audience and the conversation going on in their head. I’ll continue to use the example from the first part of the series, namely that you’re a consultant who takes on strange or off-beat jobs that the really big consulting firms can’t handle. In other words, you have a vested interest in getting inside the heads of the folks at these big firms and tell them why you’re a good candidate for subcontract work.

You’ve already decided that you need to talk about things that relate to that audience: specifically, your topic(s) of expertise, and how to best hire someone like you. Now, you can come out and say, “Hire me because I’m good!” but that kind of approach hardly ever works. When you think that you’re writing a newsletter that goes out on a regular basis, you start seeing how ridiculous it would be for someone to get this blatant message over and over and over again.

So what you have to do is figure out an editorial calendar. You want to demonstrate your expertise with articles, and you need to hit different angles and aspects of the same topic (your expertise) over the course of a year. So now’s the time to sit down and plan out the year. Take out a desk or wall calendar and go through each month, asking yourself the following questions:

• Is there a special seasonal significance to this month? Are there topics I can cover that relate to the season?
• Are there major events during this month I can tie to?
• Are there special needs in my business that require extra communication during this month?
• Is this month a good time to try different formats, such as a podcast or workshop, that I can promote through the newsletter?

These four questions will get you started (there are many, many others) but let’s drill down a bit, as I already see some of you shaking your heads. Let’s take the first question. I know that many of you aren’t retailers, and you’re thinking to yourself, why should I care about Christmas during November and December?

Well, maybe you don’t, in the traditional sense, but every season brings on its own little challenges. For example, if you were a security consultant, an article or two about identity theft during the holiday season probably wouldn’t go amiss. If you were a bank sending out a newsletter to your accountholders, security reminders about identity theft, phishing, and pharming would be good (not to mention, it’s a good time to remind them of low-interest loans for that new car!).

If its summer, and you’re in the insurance business, perhaps its time to remind folks about the upcoming rains and does everyone have flood insurance? Or coverage against hurricanes if you’re on the Gulf Coast?

But let’s get back to our primary example. If you’re that small consultant taking subcontract work from the big guys, you know something about the cycles in the consulting business. You know that Q1 is generally pretty slow–all you’re doing is trawling for work, writing proposals, and recovering from a crazy December. Come March and April, it’s a different story. Work is in full swing, most of it with a July 4 deadline, and it stays that way until around late June.

Then there’s another break mid-July to mid-August while everyone goes to the beach on vacation. Then in September, things ramp up again for a crazy period that ends right before Christmas.

If you know this rough schedule, then you can rough out an editorial calendar and fill it with reasons to communicate. In other words, you want to have something relevant to say other than that thing that is only relevant to you, which is “do you have any work for me?”

So in Q1, your newsletter would probably have articles in it that talk about how to use someone like you to plan upcoming budgets or projects, or how to run an audit on unsuccessful projects from the year before. In Q2, your newsletter would have content in it that features specific expertise on the kinds of projects you like to take on, such as ecommerce or chemical engineering or translation (whatever).

In Q3, your articles would focus on how to prepare for work-life balance in the upcoming silly season, or how to hire someone who will be able to work well in XYZ environment. You might slip in some information about how something you did last year will make things easier this year too. Finally, your Q4 articles might look ahead a bit to your usually dry Q1, reminding folks that if they still have a budget, pay you now and you’ll do the work in Q1, etc.

Ideally, at the end of the process, you should have 2-3 things to say in each newsletter, along with something special to add. For example, you might include a coupon or a special offer (hire you in December and get 10% off the bill) or an announcement (5% of receipts in May got to Literacy Austin) or maybe just a free report or audio podcast.

Now that you know all this stuff, you can plan for it. You can line up guest speakers (if you’re doing a workshop) or interview the right customers or people, or gather testimonials. You can even take things a step further and theme every edition, tackling a major area of expertise with each issue (or all the issues in a quarter or month).

In the next part, we’ll talk about the next step, which is building trust and validity with each newsletter.

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My latest article has just been published over at the Amazon Developer Center. The article in question walks you through the steps of building a small office backup system using PHP (and then multithreading it using another tool like Perl). If you’re not familiar with all the great Amazon web services available, S3 (or Simple Storage Service) is a high-availability, high-bandwidth third-party storage system in which you literally pay pennies on the GB for file storage.

Check out the story, and let me know what you think. Also available as PDF.

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I get a lot of calls and emails from small companies (and small marketing departments at bigger companies) seeking help with their e-newsletters. Most of the callers don’t have any kind of email or online newsletter, or even a print newsletter. The questions vary from time to time, but usually people are just looking for some overall guidelines to get them started and keep them going into the foreseeable future.

I’ve received enough of these calls that I think it’s time to create a little series of blog posts to discuss what makes a great e-newsletter. In this first part (I really don’t know how many posts I’ll need to finish, but let’s assume 3-4) I don’t want to get into any technical details of how to send emails, handle bouncebacks, overcome spam filters, and the like. Nor do I want to get into the trappings of sending HTML email (at least not yet) or even good ways to dedup an email list or ensure that you have a good list.

No, the first thing I want to talk about is the single most overlooked part of the e-newsletter equation. This part trips up more companies than you think, as it leads to lots of unsubscribes, angry emails, low conversion rates, and everything else that you normally file under “nightmare”.

This first part of the process, the one thing that will make the rest of your e-newsletter life easier, is very, very simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s a wonder it’s ever overlooked. What is it? RELEVANCE. This 9-letter word, a very important word for any marketing campaign or process, is key to your success. Without relevance, you’re going to send the wrong content to the wrong people, or perhaps the right content to the right people, but at the wrong time of year (or even the wrong part of the day or week). Without relevance, you’re going to have lots of trouble getting people to act on offers or click links to read the rest of the story.

The strict dictionary definition of relevance is “pertinence to the matter at hand.” Ask yourself: of all the myriad marketing messages you receive daily, how many pass this simple test? Not a lot, I’d wager. In fact, think about the ones that you do respond to–were they relevant to you?

Anecdotally, I cite the case of the Ray Sings, Basie Swings CD. I love Ray Charles, and I have an affinity for that old time pre-rock Swing music (a lot of which, with the necessary infusion of blues, country, and boogie woogie, became rock & roll). I first heard about this CD (which is fabulous by the way, a product of technical imagination come to life) while watching TV (or rather, something I’d taped on TiVO).

I usually zip through the commercials, but for some reason, I saw a commercial with Ray Charles in it, and I backed it up to watch. I immediately jumped up, went to my computer, and ordered the CD from Amazon.com. Relevance leading to action.

(My other point is, what were the odds of me seeing that? Slim to none. But I digress.)

Let’s zoom in a bit on the word relevance, and specifically to its etymology. Seems that the word entered the English language in the 1550s, derived from medieval Latin relevant, itself derived from earlier Latin relevare, which, for all you citizens of the Roman Empire, meant “to raise or lift up”. As in, so it can be seen, but I also like the other connotation, of making something important (or up on a pedestal or dais).

With all this in mind, what’s the easiest way to make things relevant? Well, you either have to get everyone on your wavelength (very hard to do) or you have to get on their wavelength (also hard, but at least within the realm of the possible). After all, if you sat down and studied what is on the minds of your customers and prospects, you have some chance of either:

a) Hitting on a topic with wide enough appeal to be relevant to everyone;
b) Hitting on a spectrum of topics that will interest a wide array of people;
c) Segment your messaging in such a way that everyone gets something partly (or mostly) relevant to their situation.

There are probably 5,000,000 articles out there on how to segment, so I won’t get into any of that at the moment. For right now, it doesn’t matter, really, what statistical methods you use to slice and dice your audience. What really matters now is figuring out what conversation is going on inside your customers’ (and prospects’) minds. If you can figure out what’s in their head (and no, I’m not trying to suggest that you become a mind reader) then you can create a relevant message that will have a higher chance of getting their attention.

Let me give you a for instance. Let’s say that you’re a boutique consulting group that only handles certain kinds of work. You do very little marketing at all, and zero advertising. Most of your time is spent working with very large consulting groups, doing specialty jobs that they don’t have the time, energy, expertise, or financial capability to cover. In other words, you’re doing the offbeat, small-fry stuff (at least to them) that they are happy to subcontract to you.

If you were creating an e-newsletter for this business, what do you think would be the most relevant content you could put into it to maximize your success. Would you put in articles about your particular background? Maybe, but its iffy. Would you put in puff pieces that talk about how long you’ve been in business or what your recent accomplishments have been. Maybe, but I wouldn’t spend much time on it.

No, the thing this e-newsletter needs is a shot of relevance. Think to yourself, what is the biggest problem on the minds of your customers and prospects? Well, in this case, its probably, “How in the world am I going to get that part of the project done? Do we know anyone who can do this kind of work?” They’re feeling stress, because they don’t want to endanger the customer relationship (which is probably worth 10x or 20x or 100x the budget of this one little deal) by failing to do the work, screwing up the work, or hiring someone who is unprofessional.

So guess what….your e-newsletter should probably talk about things like:

How to hire a firm that does XYZ
10 things you didn’t know about XYZ that will trip you up
15 ways to succeed with XYZ
3 sure-fire ways to fail when implementing XYZ

Now you’re inserting yourself into the conversation already running in the head of the reader. Now you’re becoming relevant. You’re standing out (or up). Now you’re taking a stand. And guess what, this kind of thinking pays dividends in the rest of your marketing too: your blog, your brochure copy, white papers, you name it.

That’s it for now. In the next part, I’ll talk about the next step: building an editorial calendar.

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I’ll be the first to admit that web developers, regardless of their coding platform, religious preference (microsoft or unix? mac or windows?), and personal hygiene standards have one thing in common:

They love computers, but they sometimes have a hard time dealing with the people part of the business.

In the spirit of this statement, I decided to compile a short list of things that you can do to make a web developer (actually, any programmer) stark raving mad:

• Be sure to confuse requirements with specifications. In other words, don’t tell a web developer that you want to track customers as they travel through your web site, spend lots of useless time telling us exactly what kind of fields to use in the cookie, when and where to dump that info into a database table, and while you’re at it, give us the fields in that database. Might as well tell us what colors and fonts you want to track in the cookie too, while you’re at it.
• Bring up at least two things you read in magazine articles (or heard at a conference) that directly conflict with each other. My favorite one came from an old friend working at big-firm-whose-name-is-withheld for obvious reasons. Said firm wanted to implement an Ajax application, but the application had to work with Javascript turned off. Hello! The j in Ajax stands for Javascript. It no workee without it! Somehow my friend stuck with it. He’s a better man than I.
• When reporting a bug, don’t provide any details. In no way would it be good if we knew the URL involved, the steps you took to get there, your browser, and your platform, or anything else that might impact the situation (such as hitting the page via a VPN that sucks the life right out of your available bandwidth). Please don’t mention if you’re in a hotel room going through a dialup connection, or if you’re using a never-before-heard-of browser on the Mongolian edition of Ubuntu linux loaded on a vintage 1993 IBM PC XT.
• When you talk to us, make sure that you do it in an ad-hoc way. We’ll remember everything you tell us as you bump into us in the hallway, or as we’re leaving work for the day. Don’t write it down, for heaven’s sake, not even on a whiteboard, nor give any thought to vetting what you say or prioritizing it. And if you do send us email, make sure that you send about 15 of them, each with a separate little snippet of information, all of it mixed up without a sense of flow. We analytic types love puzzles!
• Bring in a third-party vendor at the last minute and then have that vendor’s requirements impact the foundations of the project right before launch. Extra points if the third-party vendor is a viral marketing or SEO expert (or some other field that involves instinct and hunches). Make whatever they say binding, and force the web developer(s) in question to put in 10x the work to make it all work. Then blame the web developer for (a) being late or (b) not understanding the new requirements or (c) implementing it all to perfection such that the whole thing implodes.
• Hype whatever product the web developer is working on past all point of recognition, such that when it’s finally launched, no one understands what the big deal was. I call this the “moon launch” effect. There you are, happily working on an ecommerce site, but behind your back, the boss (and the boss’s boss) is going around giving slideshow presentations about how you’re building the next generation of social marketing commerce tools….what a slap in the face that’s going to be!
• If you give us a task, make sure that you omit a deadline. I have nothing else to do, so I’ll just jump on this right away! No deadline means no urgency. Plain and simple.

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Was having lunch with a dear friend of mine (who happens to be gay) and he joked that he has a simple litmus test to see if a nascent relationship has a chance to last. He simply asks if is beaux-to-be knows who LBJ is. If they do, he knows they’re either old enough or smart enough to continue.

I was thinking that web developers could do the same thing. Last year I mentioned Webmonkey to a young HTML coder I knew and she didn’t know what I was talking about, which just about gave me a heart attack. The site is a shadow of its former self, but during the mid- to late-90s it was the place to go to learn all about the hip Web technologies: HTML, Perl, Flash, animated GIFs, and more. I still remember with pleasure reading through those tutorials and figuring out how to do things.

The webmonkeys wrote with panache and flare. They are a hallmark of a simpler time before all of us became slaves to the Web 2.0 grind. Sniff.

From now on, I’ll drop cryptic references to webmonkey into conversations with fellow geeks. If they get it, then I know they’re part of my tribe. If they don’t, I’ll know exactly who I’m dealing with, mwaaahaha.

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Presenting a very short (around 12 minutes) screencast tutorial on creating a simple Google AdWords campaign. The screencast covers campaigns, groups, and creating ads and ad variations.

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Twitter, for the uninitiated, is this annoying little technology that asks the question, “What are you doing now?” Members of Twitter then answer that question (with “tweets”) throughout the day using 140 characters or less in each posting. Being sentient carbon-based lifeforms of varying intelligence and social acumen, these members answer the question within a spectrum of sophistication and from a multitude of platforms.

What this means, gentle reader, is that if you become a member of Twitter and start “following” people, you are apt to get all kinds of things, like “I just ate a burger” or (less frequently) “I just solved Fermat’s Theorem”. And you’ll open yourself to all this from people sitting in front of web browsers, IM interfaces, and even cell phones.

In other words, it’s just like IM, but 1000x worse. A few years ago, I told my employees that I would fire the next one I caught using IM on company time. Why? Because there’s no way to concentrate and get into flow when somebody is constantly yacking at them, asking questions, sending comments, or what have you. If it’s that important, pick up the phone! Or better yet, compile all your thoughts into *one* email and send it to me! Then wait for me to take a break (which will be in a few hours because I’m concentrating on my work) and I will answer you in complete sentences.

But Twitter is far, far worse than IM. See, instead of getting a personal message like you do on IM, what you’re seeing is a message that is being broadcast to 10, 20, 100, 1000 or more people. If you receive these on your cellphone, you experience severe disgruntlement. I’m of that generation that associates calls and messages sent to a cell phone as being more important than calls made to a land line. Getting a message on my cell phone means “this person tried me on a land line, couldn’t get me, and is now trying to get to me here–hence, important!”

To have that happen and then see that hoodoo2123 (who is a good friend, otherwise you wouldn’t be following him, right? right??) is now watching Starsky & Hutch reruns, then have it happen again (now yada54 is making cream of wheat) and then again (in which yoyobot is playing with her puppy) is really very very annoying. (Not to mention expensive, if your cell phone service charges extra to text messages.)

Some would argue that this is the kind of communication that bonds people together into a social network. Excuse me, but this is exactly the kind of thinking that people suffering from some social awkwardness syndrome really believe in. Good communication is about relevance and pragmatism. If you were at a social gathering (one in real life, I mean) and everyone just constantly spammed their immediate environment with stories and feelings and thoughts helter-skelter, it isn’t bonding. It’s annoying. Real communication is about finding out what the other person is interested in, and talking about that, and then picking up on subtle (and not-so-subtle) cues that it’s okay to keep talking about that topic or time to move on.

It reminds me of a very bright computer engineer I had the misfortune of meeting at a holiday gathering a few years ago. Very very smart. MIT smart. A few of us were talking about hiking and photography and what we’d been up to since the last time we saw each other. This guy kept interrupting our flow with random comments about things he was working on at work, none of which had any bearing on what the rest of us were talking about. We would process what he had said, ask a few questions, get more cryptic stuff, and then keep talking about our lives. He was just annoying enough that we didn’t try too hard to include him (I cop to that ) but HEY, that’s the point of social group dynamics. If I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t have to! And you don’t have to listen!

I guess from a Twitter perspective, his communication strategy made total sense–just keep talking about what it is you’re interested in, and I’ll do the same, and we’ll all go home and call that a conversation. Sheesh!

Here’s another chilling thought: using this technology as a true marketing platform. Amazon and others are already starting down this path. Reminds me of web pages crammed full of deals at airline ticket travel sites. Or the meaningless emails you get from places that list 500 rolex watches for sale.

The key here is not amplitude, it’s relevance. I want to take Hope on a trip to Scotland. I want to see airfares for Scotland. Not anything else. Sign me up for that, and I’ll be interested. Or, if I were to continue using Twitter, I’m interested in just seeing tweets on things that relate to a certain set of topics, and you can keep all the rest.

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