Conducting a 360 Degree Review of Your Web Platform and Marketing Efforts

By Michael Tasner

Entrepreneur, author, speaker, and charity proponent

Posted: July 23, 2010 02:01 PM

I’m a huge fan of 360-degree reviews. You may have heard of these. They are typically used in the Human Resource department of a company for employee reviews. The objective of the review is to get a view from all different angles (thus the name 360 degrees) of the particular employee.

Here’s how it works: You’re an employee working at one of the large automakers (who will remain nameless). Assuming you still have a job, you work daily with other employees just like you, for a direct supervisor. You have people reporting directly to you. In the process of conducting your review to decide whether you will get a two-cent-per-hour raise (I know, don’t get too excited), your performance will be reviewed by your boss, your peers, and your own direct reports. This ensures that you’re getting the most accurate representation of the quality of your work. It also serves as a great checks-and-balances system. If your boss didn’t like you, that is only one leg of the review. And one of these days you will be part of your boss’s 360-degree review.

Let’s take similar methodology and apply it to your current marketing tactics. This will allow us to see your greatest opportunities for expansion.

Step 1:Make a list of all the people who have a hand in or are touched by your marketing efforts.

For example: The CEO, your marketing director, marketing executives, salespeople, engineers, research and development folks, vendors, partners, and your customers. The key here is to make sure you are not leaving anyone out. If you miss one person, you are not fully getting a 360-degree review.

Step 2:Construct two to three surveys for those people to complete.

The first survey will go to all internal employees, the second to your vendors/partners, if applicable, and the last to your customers. It’s up to you if you want to send this to all your customers. It depends highly on how many customers you have. If you’re a smaller company, I recommend sending it to all your customers. If you’re a larger company with thousands of customers, send it to enough clients to get a good response back. Typical response rates range from 3% to 10%. I’ve seen lower, but I’ve also seen response rates as high as 90%. But those are just the averages.

A few important notes on these surveys:

• I encourage you to send these 100% electronically. When sending surveys electronically, you have a much higher chance of getting a response. There are various survey tools out there, such as SurveyMonkey.com, Zoomerang.com, and KeySurvey.com.
• Keep them short to increase your response rate.
• Give some type of incentive for your outside vendors, partners, or customers to fill these out, and watch your response rates skyrocket. (For example, give them 10% off their next order.)
• Modify anything to fit your business.

I like allowing for comments after each question to solicit additional feedback. The reason I ask and solicit more open-ended feedback is to ensure that we don’t miss any of the trends.

Step 3:Compile the data.

This is going to take you quite a bit of time. Here are some tips for compiling the data:

• Many of the survey software tools will do this for you.
• Develop three different Microsoft Excel files and label them appropriately (internal, vendors/partners, customers).
• Start with the quantifiable data and get that into Excel. Most likely this will be a simple export.
• Move on to the open-ended questions. Take all the responses for each question and place them into Excel so you can see all the data in front of you.
• Scroll down the column of open-ended questions and look for trends. I like to use the find feature in Excel to see whether similar words are being found. For example, you could search for craigslist to see all the places it was mentioned.
• When you find similar answers in the open-ended questions, group those together.
• When you have this task done, you should be able to easily see the results for the quantifiable section, and all the answers to the open-ended sections grouped together with similar thoughts.
• Lastly, do the same thing with the comments as you did with the open-ended questions: Group similar comments together, using the find feature to aid in this task.

Step 4:Interpret the data.

You now have your data organized in a much more logical format so that you can start figuring out what it all means. Print out all the sheets and spread them out across a long desk so you can see everything. What you’re looking for here are trends across the various groups, as well as weaknesses in your marketing strategy. Keep in mind that in this exercise bad news is actually good — it’s what you’re looking for. It’s great to see the good stuff, but we’re more concerned with the areas in which you need to improve because these are your greatest opportunities for improvement and growth. What you are most likely going to find is two-fold: 20% of your marketing is producing the most results. The other 80% is a waste of time, money, and energy.

The above is an adapted excerpt from the book Marketing in the Moment: The Practical Guide to Using Web 3.0 Marketing to Reach Your Customers First by Michael Tasner. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.

Copyright © 2010 Michael Tasner, author of Marketing in the Moment: The Practical Guide to Using Web 3.0 Marketing to Reach Your Customers First

My Favorite Things, Oprah Style

By Michael Tasner

Entrepreneur

Posted: November 24, 2010 01:00 PM

My favorite Oprah episode of the year (yes I admit it, I watch Oprah from time to time) is her “Favorite Things Show.” While I understand these are not always her favorite things (as companies pay handsomely for the product placement), I simply love watching the audience reaction when they hear they are getting things like:

• Diamond Earings worth $2000
• A Volkswagon Beetle (the new 2012)
• High end Pot Set worth $500
• And Beyond

In following Oprah’s Favorite things show, I decided to release my first ever “Michael’s Favorite Things.” One big thing I do want to point out, however, is that these really are my favorite things, and I was not paid by any of these companies to mention their names. Here we go…

Project Management:Google — There are some days when I say Google more than my own name. My staff and I simply use Google for pretty much everything. From email and sharing files to creating slide shows, all stored in the cloud. It’s an amazing tool and at $50/year it’s totally worth the money.

Managing Customers:Salesforce.com — One area that I’ve noticed most people need some support is in managing their customers and their leads. Many people simply don’t track this information, and if they do track the information it’s all over the place and incomplete. We’ve been using Salesforce.com for over five years and have found it to be an amazing tool. We track our leads, customers, contracts, and even our contractors through Salesforce.com. The data is once again stored in “the cloud”, so you can access the information from anywhere without having to download any software.

Video Conferencing:Skype — As I have contractors throughout the world, it wouldn’t make sense for me to buy a phone plan for everyone, so we turn to Skype. While I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Skype (sometimes it simply does not work), it has been an amazing tool. When you take a step back and realize you are talking to someone halfway across the world for free, and with video it makes you wonder where technology will be in another five years or so.

WordPress:WordPress — Boy do I love WordPress. Every web site that we designed in the last 12-18 months has been in WordPress. It’s easy to use, easy to customize and has the option of being scaled to drastic levels using one of the tens of thousands of plug-ins.

Member Sites:Wish List Member — Passive, reoccurring revenue has been the name of the game in a down economy. We’ve been accomplishing that through membership-based web sites. As all the sites we design have been in WordPress, we wanted to find a really cool plug-in that makes making membership sites a breeze, then we stumbled upon Wish List Member (created by two really cool guys). The plug-in has rocked our socks off and seems to get better every version they release.

Sharing Files:Dropbox — Last but not least, Dropbox. Remember the days of sending files (small or large) back and forth or using a site like Yousendit.com. Those days are long gone. Install Dropbox on your computer (s) and you’re in business. You can upload files and it will automatically sync those files with your other computers in the office. Need to share a folder or file with someone? Right click share, put in their email and the files start transferring to their computers. My favorite part — if you share a folder with someone once, anytime you move anything into the folder it gets shared with them automatically, like magic!

I could have went on and on with some of my other favorite things but I wanted to limit the list to seven things that you should be using regardless of your business size. These tools are all easy to use and can be deployed quite quickly.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US. And to everyone else, have a rocking week!

8 Secretes To Successful Blogging

By Michael Tasner

Entrepreneur, author, speaker, and charity proponent

Posted: November 3, 2010 01:10 PM

#1 It’s all about giving value and building trust.

The entire reason of having a blog is to provide your readers with value and educational materials to read. If you keep the phrases value and trust in mind when writing blog posts, your posts will be much better, your readership will grow much faster, and your people will be more loyal. Keep in mind, you’re providing content for free. When you go above and beyond and over-deliver, you’ll be hitting a home run. Some of the most read blogs in the world are worth millions and millions of dollars. These blogs were built by providing relevant and useful content overtime. That’s it, plain and simple.

The key to building trust is to understand that your readers are looking for specific content only.

If you have an educational blog on Schishons, a shitsu and bichon dog mix, you could provide information about:

• Feeding tips
• Breeding ideas
• How to better care for your pet
• Links to different dog related products

Some things that will kill your trust immediately:

• Writing a post on a MLM your readers should join
• Loading it with banner ads on cars for sale

#2 There is no ideal length of a blog post.

As long as the information you are providing is relevant and informative, post it. This may range from a one line post pointing out a useful article, to a 2000 word article.

#3 Pay very close attention to the titles of your posts.

The title tag is what Google places weighs when it looks to rank your post higher than others. It’s best to load your title with a keyword or two.

Targeted Keyword: Atlanta Wedding Planner

A good example of a title: 3 Ways a Wedding Planner in Atlanta Can Help Your Wedding

A poor title: Read this about Wedding Planning in Your Area

The reason the first title is much better is that it mentions the keyword exactly and includes a specific location.

#4 There are good ways and bad ways to link in posts.

First, please understand that every blog post does not need a link. We encourage links every third post or so.

Good Ways to Link:

• Linking to your products or services in a “non-salesy” way.
• Linking to other blogs, or articles of interest and why your readers should check them out.

Bad Ways to Link

• The entire blog post is simply a link to an article.
• Saying: Check out our products here (and that’s it).

When posting to links, only post to things that are relevant. Remember you do not want to loose the trust of your audience. If you recommend something too far out in right field, you’re going to lose subscribers.

#5 Interaction is critical.

To get the important interaction from your readers, you need to write “enticing” content. At the end of the post, ask for feedback in the form of comments. You can also send out an email to people on your mailing list or those following your RSS feeds saying; I want your feedback.

Example:

I hope you enjoyed this post. I want to hear from you. Give me some comments, your thoughts, your links, your ideas, opinions and beyond. I promise to write back to each and every one.

#6 Write in a tone that everyone can understand.

Some of you may be writing highly technical blog posts. This is fine, but realize that not every one of your readers may be as advanced as the next one. In order to “appeal to the masses,” you want to keep things relatively neutral in nature.

Let me contradict this statement for a second though. If it’s your intention to only attract a certain readership, then keep your writing to them specifically.

If your blog was about Advanced CSS Programming, then write solely for this audience. It wouldn’t make sense to provide basic how-to information for beginners on your blog.

#7 Include personal information to further build rapport.

Remember you’re looking to give things of value, and build trust. Well you also want to build rapport. One of the many ways you can build rapport is to include some personal information about you and your family.

Some examples might include:

• A photo of you and your family
• Information about your kids birthday
• Comments and photos form a recent family vacation

Not only do your readers want good information, they also want to know you’re a real live person just like everyone else!

#7.5 Just have fun!

Blogging should be fun. I wouldn’t look at this like a job and a mundane task. If you do that, you’re going to have a hard time blogging. Have some fun with it, I promise you it’s not that hard!

#8 Here are objectives to consider for successful blogging.

• To be informative and educational, providing something of value to the world.
• To build report with readers so you can sell your products and services.
• To obtain top ten search engine rankings for your different posts.
• To build a portal of useful information. Example: A portal for real estate investors to come and hang out. (When your blog becomes “the go-to portal,” you’re golden.)
• To increase your RSS followers.
• To aid in increasing your expert status.

Beginning with the end in mind is a great way to start, happy blogging!