march 2008

Email marketing can be a very effective means of communicating on-line but one needs to be careful. With all the spam out there, it can be difficult. I recently sat down with the CEO of mobileStorm – email and mobile marketing, Jared Reitzin and picked his brain.

Q. Tell us a little about your site and services. A. mobileStorm has pioneered the concept of multi-channel marketing for the small-to medium-sized business. We provide a turnkey, hosted email and digital messaging platform backed by world-class support and expert digital marketing services.

We have created the most complete digital marketing solution available, enabling our customers to reach their audiences via email, text (mobile) messaging, voice messaging or fax broadcast from a single provider. Our service is web-based, and client can sign up and send their first campaign in less than 10 minutes.

Q Where do you see email/direct marketing going in the future? A. Presence marketing. This is where I get emails, SMS messages etc.. that is related to my presence or location. For instance if I travel to New York, my usual Tuesday morning ticketmaster email wouldn’t have events in So Cal, but in Manhattan. 

Q. How can local business use email marketing to help promote themselves?  A. Let’s take a restaurant business for example. They should be asking on their comment cards for someone’s email address. In exchange for the address, the restaurant will send out offers only available from their “e-club”. They can offer last minute weekend specials, 2 for 1 drinks etc.. they can offer real coupons that can be printed out and redeemed. Email marketing is the perfect medium for local business because it is easy to build your database and inexpensive to market to it. Ever bought an add in the LA times or a 30 second radio spot? 

Q. How can one effectively email or direct market using your services without getting lost in all the spam out there? A. It’s tough. Spammers have made it hard for legitimate marketers to get their messages into the inbox. The email inbox vendors like hotmail, yahoo, and AOL have an even harder job. They spend millions fighting spam. If their customer’s inbox is filled with spam, they will lose them, so they put very tight systems in place to fight spam. These systems aren’t perfect, legit mail gets blocked all of the time.  There is a war going on and the crazy part is that 90% of spam comes from 10 people/organizations.

Spammers are always one step ahead of everyone. The best thing a business can do is make sure they are following best practices , and working with an Email Service Provider (or ESP) like mobileStorm to ensure they have the best chance to hit the inbox. ESPs will offer things like authentication, dedicated IP addresses and whitelisting, all much needed services for email deliverability. 

Q. For a business just starting out-how can they use your services or where should they start?  A. We built Stun! with the small business in mind. I actually wanted to make it ...

Another quick post on a few articles on link building that I thought deserved your attention:

Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts put together by Pole Position Marketing. You can even download a pdf file.  

No Recession For Link Building by Eric Ward

How Social Media Becomes Link Fertilizer, by Eric Ward   

There have been a number of informative posts on the subject over the last few months, so I decided to share those I liked.

It is getting more important these days to have some idea of what is being said about you and your company. More and more business are now offering reputation management services.  Happy reading.

Mike B, the Internet Guy had a nice list of articles in his post, Online Reputation Management Interview and Resources

Interview: Online Reputation Management with Brett Borders over at seOverflow

Marketing Pilgram: Five Steps for Recovering from an Online Reputation Crisis

Masable Social Networking News: Online Reputation Management for Individuals

Search Engine Land: Local Business Listings: Dealing with Negative Reviews by Chris Linnett

Reputation Monitoring Made Easy, And Free! by Aaron Wall- nice article on do-it-yourself reputation management.

Today I have the privilage of speaking with John A.Manning, SVP Business Development of GenieKnows.

Q. Can you tell us a little about yourself?  A. My background is in Clinical Therapy and Educational Psychology which I practced as a private practioner until 2004.I am one of the founding partners of Genieknows.com which we started in 1999. At present I am the SVP of Business Development and my Barb is the CEO and President.   Q. What is Genieknows? How long has it been around? A. Genieknows.com is an online Advertising Network that offers national and international premium traffic to advertisers or their  agents. At present our network of global publishers provides about 1.6 billion searches or queries per month from USA, Canada,Western Europe and UK,Pacific Rim countries, Australia,Hong Kong, Taiwan to name a few.

We provide geo targeting so advertisers can select where and when they want their ads to be seen. We have patent pending state of the art fraud detection techniques to protect our advertsers campaigns. What we have done most recently, in addition to offering results in wide range of search keywords, is focus on certain niche areas, particularly Games, Health, and of course Local Search.   Q. How can a small business use Genieknows to help promote their business, increase their online visibility? A. Genieknows allows small and medium  size  businesses to have greater control over their ads and hence their potential market like they can not do with the larger search engines. We work personally and closely with advertisers on the phone, in real time to make sure they are having their needs met and not being victimized and losing money.

Our Local Search tools are part of the neighborhood for both the merchant and the purchaser, making the business of buying and selling user friendly and simple like it should be. People live in neighborhoods not “big cities”; they shop in neighborhoods, they visit “areas” for business and pleasure. They want to know the businesses and services that are there;and the businesses want to know their customers and what they want. Genieknows Local makes all that really easy and pleasant. Businesses have visibility and become part of the shoppers mental road map for goods.   Q. What is Genieknows Local? A. Local.Genieknows.com is only one of three local search engines that provides results for all the USA and Canada; the other two are Google and MSN. Genieknows Local is a way of thinking and doing business that makes sense to merchants and shoppers. It provides tools and functionalities unlike any other local search  engine because it allows you to organize space and services like you want and need to do which may be different for someone else.   Q. Where does Genieknow Local gets its info? Any particular database(s) you use? A. All of our patent pending technology is developed in house; we have our own research department and do our own crawling of the web.   Q. How can a small business get listed with Genieknows local? A. Any size business can get listed with Genieknows local by simply going to our ...

When everyone is speaking /writing about local search engines, usually they mean Google and Yahoo, but what about Local.com?  They seemed to be in the news every other week last year,  (check out their press releases) and just recently this year - Local.com Wins Hitwise U.S. Top Ten Award. 

I get my clients listed there and from what I have seen, heard, and reviewed, Local.com is pretty good. They are one of the top players in local search.

So…my questions to you are: Do you use Local.com? Do you think they are a big player in local search? Do you like what they are doing?

Look forward to your input.