After a weekend of music at South by Southwest, one would think Bill Leake may be a little off his game. Good thing for us, he wasn’t.

By 8am the main ballroom at The Depot was pretty full, which was a little surprising to me considering a lot of us are not morning people. I guess this whole Search and Web Analytics thing is finally catching on.  I mean, can you really have successful search (or any online marketing) campaign running without any sort of Web Analytics tied to it? From what Bill said, you really can’t.

The presentation started out with an outline of the basics and some general fundamentals to follow. At this point, I was really just nodding my head in agreement and happy that I’m on the right track with my own thought process. I also noticed a lot of the same thing going on throughout the ballroom. According to Bill, what it comes down to is this; we all know that it’s great to track our campaigns, but do we understand what we’re tracking and what our objective is? That objective is probably the most important aspect of tracking any campaign. Before we even start posting code all over our sites, we need to ask ourselves one simple question. Do we know what we need to get out of this?

Bill made a comment as he was rolling into the topic of testing and tracking that I liked enough to write down. “Measure twice, cut once”. We all know that any campaign should be tested before rolling out, but if you’re not tracking it then what’s the point? He talked about how you can, and should, try anything but you have to track it in order to understand the results. Gone are the days of throwing up some cool creative or a crazy offer out there and seeing what sticks. Agreed.

We all like case studies right? I mean, if someone else can do it, that means we can too. During the morning session, we heard about a B2B client who was spending $110K/month on their PPC campaign, which doesn’t seem too horrible to me. They were finally convinced to optimize their search campaign to find out which keywords were actually converting to sales. What a concept! In doing this, they dropped their overall monthly spend by 40%. Wouldn’t we all like to make our budgets drop by 40% and see more efficient results?

What it all really comes down to is that a lot of us are great with the creative, but not so great with the numbers. The excuses are endless… “Our technology can’t handle it”, “We don’t understand how to use the tool”, “It’s too expensive to set up”, yada, yada, yada. The point that Bill was trying to make, and that I hope we all understand now, is that we have to do the dirty work to get to the good work.

All in all, the session was definitely insightful and Bill kept me awake and at full attention for the 45 minutes he spoke. By the end of the presentation, I wasn’t just nodding my head in agreement; I was saying to myself “that’s a great idea”. I did write down one more quote that I thought was pretty funny with regard to testing. To quote Bill, we should all “put the frog in cold water and turn up the burner instead of throwing the frog directly in the warm water”.

Make sure you download the deck and the podcast when you get a chance.

We all know the power of viral marketing.  But the question is, how do you create a campaign that truly connects and engages your audience and encourages them to pass along your message voluntarily?

As a frequent traveler and lover of deals, I am a regular subscriber to Travelzoo’s Top 20 weekly emails.  For those of you that are not familiar with the site, Travelzoo is a website that evaluates and publishes travel deals for hundreds of leading travel companies.  For a traveler on a limited budget like me, it’s a great resource.

The reason for writing this post is that I recently received an email from Travelzoo that promoted their “Win the entire top 20” sweepstakes, which in my opinion is a great example of a campaign that engages subscribers, encourages repeat visits, and most importantly, referrals to friends.  How did they do this, you ask?  They’ve created a micro-site complete with a “clear the clouds” board game, trivia questions and the ability to post links/banners to the promotional site on social media sites that allow subscribers to earn more entries into the sweepstakes.  If you have the time take a look – but be careful it’s addictive.

I think that this promotion is a pretty compelling offer to begin with, but with the addition of these engagement tools, it’s much more powerful.  You can bet I’ll be paying repeat visits to this site and as this post proves, spreading the message amongst my peers!
I’m curious if anyone else is developing campaigns like this to build internal lists or lead databases – what is your strategy? What has worked for you and what hasn’t?

Matt Dickman is already disappointed in me. You see, it took me way too much time to post this blog entry.

He himself would’ve had it on Twitter, 3jam and Pownce within minutes of leaving the Fine Line Music Cafe in Minneapolis last night.  That’s where he told MIMA members and MCAD students about “The Future of Advertising” and outlined the impact of social networking on mass communications. 

Of course, he wouldn’t have stopped with mere text. Matt Dickman would’ve uploaded photos, video clips and mini-podcasts, too. Then he would have checked any blog mentions through Radiant Six, or used his Google Alert to see where his name had popped up.

Matt is a veteran. He’s been blogging for four years. In fact, he used his Techno//Marketer blog to snag his current gig at Fleishman-Hillard in Cleveland, where he uses digital media for corporate public relations.

His talk wasn’t limited to social networking. He talked about advertising (which is changing).  And traditional interactive (which should be changing). And public relations, too.

Unlike those who worship the latest “bright shiny things,” however, Matt Dickman is a firm — one could almost say traditional — believer in the importance of strategy. Analyze your product. Understand your goals.  Know your audience. It sounds almost like old-school advertising and public relations.

But maybe that’s Matt’s point. We still need big strategies. (A Facebook page is not a strategy.) But as new technologies gain more converts, we also need to keep pace. For our clients — and for our own jobs.

No way, you say.

Think again. Right here in our backyard, Target is asking agencies who might otherwise consider themselves competitors to collaborate. If you’re not cool with this, well then, maybe you better get with the program.

More and more agencies are being asked to set competitive agendas aside and work collaboratively on behalf of their common clients.

Over at MarketingProfs Daily Fix, I interviewed Lance Thornswood, Interactive Creative Director at Target, who speaks about his role managing multiple “best-in-class” agencies.

“I’ve yet to encounter any agency that can handle both the breadth and depth required across all our media types,” says Thornswood. “They either do many things reasonably well or one thing exceedingly well. By orchestrating the integration on the client side and demanding collaboration among our agencies, we get breadth by combining the deep expertise of the best agencies in each medium.” (Read the full interview here.)

Question for all you smart MIMA members:
Are you working side-by-side with competitors?
Is it working?

Please share.

Sierra Bravo’s F1 Overnight Website Challenge pairs Twin Cities’ development team volunteers with local non-profits in need of a quality web presence in a 24-hour web development competition.

The result? Lots of caffeine, lots of camaraderie, and a little friendly competition to keep things interesting.

Check out the official F1 Overnight Website Challenge YouTube video and some pretty great pictures on Flickr. Minnesota Public Radio’s Jon Gordon also covered story – you can download the audio version here.