Email Marketing Secrets from The Motley Fool

Okay, you’ve got me: I can’t give away all of The Fool’s email marketing secrets, but I will be presenting one of our strongest email marketing campaigns later this month at DMA’s 2009 Annual Conference in sunny San Diego.

I’ll be on a panel with Donna Wells from Mint.com and Jared Dent from Turner Sports where we’ll be sharing some of our most successful email marketing campaigns and competing for the title of “Ultimate Email Marketer.”

Next week, I’ll post The Fool’s strongest email campaign on this blog so you can get an early peek — please check back then!

If you’re coming to the conference, please join us for the session on Oct 21, at 10 am. For more information about the conference and our session, please click here.

Guaranteed Social Media Success for CNBC

At The Motley Fool, we (the marketing team) watch CNBC constantly. When we moved to our new office last summer, we switched over to their “HD+” channel. It was a little disappointing — I was excited to watch Cramer in all his hi-def glory, but quickly realized their HD feed is actually pathetic standard def with an info sidebar on the right side (see pic).

As you can see, the sidebar is filled with current quotes and historical data — all important information for people following the market. However, if you think about it, it’s a complete waste of space.

The thing is: all the data that is shown on the right hand side of the screen is repetitive. Currency info and indices information is all available on the top of the CNBC screen on a rotating basis. Also, the historical info is something that can be easily found through Google or Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, or even the iPhone stocks app. In my opinion, it really doesn’t add much value for the amount of space it takes up on the screen.

In a world where information equals profits, CNBC could easily use this space to track what the community is talking about at any given point. They could pull in StockTwits about the companies that are being discussed at that given moment, monitor the #CNBC discussion thread on Twitter or start a Facebook page where (similar to CNN’s coverage of Michael Jackson’s memorial concert or the Inauguration) people could comment in real-time about the market or CNBC’s coverage, or even pull in YouTube videos that viewers create to comment on the day’s events (and put the audio on the SAP channel).

If news organizations are looking for ways to stay relevant, a simple mantra comes to mind: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Old-school news coverage is quickly being eclipsed by real-time community reporting. With this simple change in its sidebar, CNBC could take a major step toward joining the “new world” while providing more complete and interesting coverage for its viewers. Seems like a much better call then what they have now.

Leveraging the Power of Communities

A few years ago, I got into an argument with someone about the importance of choosing news sources wisely. He’s from the school of thought that says news should be delivered with context and analysis from an expert or a reporter quoting expert sources. Of course, he knows not to believe everything he reads, but he wants to get the story from the experts.

This makes sense to a lot of people — you do have to be careful about where you get your information from these days, but the ironic thing is that because we’ve learned to be careful, we’ve become smarter in our consumption of information. We’re now able to provide the context of a story, confirm the facts, and decide for ourselves what this means to us as individuals without it having to be told to us through a news reporter.

The coolest thing is that this new found ability can help us live our lives smarter as a community. We can now seek out information from multiple sources, evaluate it for ourselves, and find a more accurate or more informative answer than if we had gone to a single source.

Almost everything in our lives can be improved by leveraging the power of (usually online) community knowledge. Here are a couple places that you can start leveraging the power of community intelligence right away:

Community-powered Investing

• CAPS: Shameless plug for The Motley Fool here, but our CAPS service can really become a valuable resource to add to your investment research. Users make a call on how they think a company’s stock will perform in relation to the S&P 500 Based on that data, each stock is given a star rating that you can use to grade your next investment idea. We’ve seen some pretty amazing results when we simply let The Fool’s community rate stocks — it turns out that a greater number of votes on where a stock is heading will provide a more accurate result.
• StockTwits: For those of you who understand the value of information (and getting it immediately after a story breaks),  you have to check out StockTwits. Simply put, this is just people using Twitter to share information about specific stocks. The tweet can be a news rumor, a recent trade that was completed, or any other thoughts they have on that stock. StockTwits makes it easy for you to monitor the flow of information for important stocks to you, but you can simply search Twitter using “$” in front of the ticker symbol to see the raw flow of tweets. Do a search for “$appl” and see the ridiculous amounts of tweets that almost brought down Twitter today as a result of Apple’s iPod announcement and Steve Jobs’s return.

Community-powered Shopping

• Online Reviews: There are just so many sites for you to find great information on the product or service you want to purchase. Check out CNET for electronics reviews, Edmunds.com for car reviews, Yelp for restaurant reviews… the list could really go on and on. You’ll find that when individual users post their thoughts on a particular product, they often will have a more insightful review than a professional reviewer. Multiply that level of detail by the hundreds of reviews you’re likely to find on any number of products, and you’ll be in review heaven.
• Community Coupons: Sites like GroupOn use collective buying power to get deals from local businesses for members. This means they promise a certain number of buyers for a particular deal and if that number of promised buyers is reached, then the group as a whole will get that killer price or offer. If there aren’t enough purchasers, then no one gets that great deal.
• Let the Community Find the Best Deal: People love to search for the best deals online, and sites like Slickdeals give them a place to post a deal they found so that everyone can use it.  There are also sites like RetailMeNot that let you search for coupon codes for online vendors and provide feedback on the success rate of those codes (some expire quickly…). I find now that I don’t purchase anything online without first searching these sites.

Community-powered News

Like I mentioned earlier, old-school news organizations are on their way out the door. You want to find out the most-current information as soon as it happens? Check out Twitscoop or simply watch Twitter’s own trending topics to find out what people are talking about right now. These tools will also give you a better sense of what the real story is. For example, when the story of Michael Jackson’s collapse and subsequent death broke, it first broke on Twitter. People were reporting their own observations from his house and from the hospital. By monitoring Twitter, I found out he died more than three hours before CNN reported it on air. Of course, this story could have gone the other way — stories that break on Twitter can turn out to be simply rumors or hoaxes, but as you use this news source more, you’ll find that it becomes quite easy to figure out which stories are true and which are false.

I’m Baaaack!

Yeah — remember when I said that I’m going to write more on this blog? That I had tons of different thoughts, ideas, and rants?

Yeah, looks like I blew that one.

So here I am, trying to get back into blogging. Anybody want to place bets on whether I can maintain any sort of regularity this time?

But, if you’re the one person who reads this blog, then you probably care about marketing — specifically marketing by leveraging an online community.

So you should know about the upcoming Interact show. It’s going to have a ton of people presenting that have really helped shaped this type of marketing.

I’m planning on attending John Bell’s presentation — I’ve been reading his blog for a while and am excited to hear him speak in person (according to his Twitter page, he’s usually at conferences all over the world — and not in DC).

Some Cool Notables:
Large Hadron Rap
Steve Jobs quells fears that he is dead
and…

The Motley Fool has a Twitter page. I’m going to devote an entire post to this, but it’s cool to see how we’re paving the way for how media companies can use these type of sites.

I Give Up!

I don’t think I can fight it any longer. I’m going to have to start using Twitter again. It seems as if everyone is using it now, even if I still believe that no one really cares about what I’m doing at any given moment during the day. I still think Twitter’s a great tool for people going on trips, etc. I just don’t believe that anyone really cares that I’m:

• Sitting at my desk
• Excited about a tasty dinner tonight
• Ready to get started at The Fool.

Anyway, if you care, my Twitter page is here.

Movin’ On…

Hey all — remember me? It’s been a little hectic the past couple weeks, but I have a good reason why:

I got a new job.

I’m the newest Online Marketing Manager at The Motley Fool (www.fool.com). “Wait a second,” you’re thinking to yourself, “Didn’t you mention The Fool in a previous post?” Yes, I did. I’ll fill you in on the details of that later, but meanwhile, I wanted to let everyone know I’m still alive. A lot of interesting stuff has been happening in the past couple weeks that I want to talk about, but first need to make sure I wrap things up at DelCor properly and prepare for my new job. More to come, stay tuned.

Future Posts:

• Apple: Finally listening to their customers? Opening iPhones up to 3rd party apps.
• Comcast: It sucks when your customers hate you. Especially when they hate you enough to take a hammer to your office building.
• 2008: The year of blogging’s demise?