Marketer's Lab

FLIMP Your Video

With the mainstreaming of YouTube and all its video brethren and dramatic improvements in video delivery technology, web video has become much more common.  While video is showing up more often, many marketers I know still struggle with how to work with it and truly make the most of it.  FLIMP touts itself as a "do-it-yourself rich media marketing and communications platform" designed to help marketers create rich media microsites without any design or technical skills. 

Creating a site is done with a drag and drop interface that allows a non-technical person to create sites without any coding.   For the less technical person it appears to be pretty straightforward to put together a microsite.  They also provide analytics for the sites which allow you to measure how many views, how many times the video was started, how many completed views and what the link response was on any other microsite links.

FLIMP claims on their site a response rate 8x higher than email industry averages and provide some metrics to support their claim.  While its always a little dicey locking down on industry averages or promising better response rates, a well produced and engaging video piece certainly seems like it has a better chance of engaging the recipient and potentially producing some viral effect.   Some diverse examples of FLIMP in action can be seen here.

FLIMP is NOT an email platform, so you cannot send emails from FLIMP, but the rep I spoke with referred to a relationship with Publicaster as a preferred partner.  The rep and the web site also state that FLIMP can work with any Email Service Provider (ESP).  Both full-service and self-service offerings are available, self-service products start at $2,250 per year plus a variable monthly fee (Call FLIMP if you want exact pricing). 

So while FLIMP arguably has one of the worst names I can recall running into of late, they seem to have an interesting platform to make it a little easier to try your hand at web video.  Visit FLIMP at www.flimp.net

Track Phone Responses Online? Who Knew?

When there’s so much buzz about the latest social media widget or some other killer online marketing application it seems a little retro to be talking about tools for measuring inbound phone responses to marketing programs. That said, even in this age of IM, text and email, people do still pick up the phone to respond to various marketing programs or to get more information after visiting a web site or other destination.  Often most of us have little, if any, meaningful tracking for these kinds of phone responses.  If you’ve ever tried to wade through phone records or gather this information from multiple sources it can be a huge hassle and usually just doesn’t get done.

Enter CallSource. CallSource was founded in 1994, originally doing a lot of work in the automotive and rental housing industries. They now serve a variety of industries, primarily providing marketers the ability to track inbound calls.

Basically they provide the ability to establish local or toll-free phone numbers and through a web interface route and track responses in near-real time.  Their service allows you to understand call volumes by lead source, how/if the call was answered, when the call was placed and the number name and address of the caller. Depending on how you use the numbers, it’s possible to track the performance of different ad types, promotions or other variables. They can also record each call if that’s desired.

CallSource also provides a number of other services, but the call tracking capability seems to be the flagship offering. If you’re looking to get meaningful tracking information about phone responses, CallSource looks like a great solution. More info at www.CallSource.com

   

iCentera Winter 07 Release – Portals for Mortals Just Got Better

iCentera is one of those quiet, cool little companies offering a really unique service a lot of marketers could put to good use. (In the interest of full disclosure here, I should make it clear that no money has changed hands in exchange for these kind words.  On the off chance any iCentera folks happen to drop by the Marketer’s Lab, you're welcome). 

iCentera has a couple offerings, but their core portal solution allows marketers to create customized portals for clients, prospects, media or channel partners without much, or any, IT involvement, no html or programming knowledge and all directly from within Salesforce.com for you Salesforce fans. If you aren’t a Salesforce.com user, the application is available as a standalone as well. The Winter 07 Release was announced back in December, but since I was lost in an eggnog induced stupor, I’m just now getting around to covering it.

This newest release provides a handful of nice features; the ability to do more specific access permissions for portal users, a much improved graphical editing tool, options for more portal tab customization and the addition of new content categorization classes. I’ll spare you the full feature-by-feature laundry list in this post, you can get the details on the release via a quick screencast at http://www.viewletcentral.com/vc/viewlet.html?id=794510831

Bottom line, if you aren’t familiar with iCentera, it’s certainly worth a spin around their site www.iCentera.com to learn a little more about what they do and their new release looks like a solid step forward on the functionality side.

And Away We Go...

At least 100 million blogs are launched every nanosecond. OK, so my facts might be a little off here, but you’re probably aware of the exponential growth in the number of blogs (technorati probably has a real number). Does the world need another contribution to the snowballing mass of blog glut? Yes.

To be clear, there are plenty of great marketing blogs covering a vast expanse of topics (see blogroll for examples). I haven’t yet seen many focused on helping marketers better understand technology and how we can apply it to our work. This new blog, Marketer’s Lab, is really just an extension of my passion for staying abreast of the tools and technologies which enable better marketing and interesting ideas on how to apply those technologies.

I will be talking with vendors, fellow marketers and anyone else who might have something interesting to contribute to the conversation. Initially there will be a lot of focus on Salesforce.com and the related vendor community as there is a tremendous interest there and not a lot of independent perspective.  This blog is tied to a larger effort (to be announced) which will provide more resources in this marketing/technology area, so stay tuned.  Away we go...