In this Marketing Over Coffee learn :

About QR (Quick Response), Email Seeds, and Twitter for CRM! All this and more…

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/marketingovercoffee/MoC105.mp3]

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Show length 24:50

Brought to you by our sponsors HubSpot and Blue Sky Factory

00:27 QR and Augmented Reality

04:35 Theresa ask for more on Email seeds – like yourname+sourcecode@gmail.com

06:08 mashKULTURE.net (that has funky gear) asks about using Stumbleupon to generate hits, Chris goes instead for twitter and his own incentive program.

09:13 Greg and Chris both asking for career advice

12:58 The portable MBA series, and the swipe file

16:10 Will emails, we are huge in Melbourne, Salesforce Twitter CRM Tool, similar to Radian 6? Celebrity Twitter! We rate Hammer as Legit.

21:28 John hasn’t checked out the videos for IE8, because he was trying to kill malware.

22:11
Congratulations to Mike McAllen for his award winning client!

22:20 Past Question of the week – Survey tools: Reagan says http://www.questionpro.com, Tom says: http://checkbox.com and flypaper.com

Question of the Week – What are you using for your swipe file?

Upcoming Event Watch: PRSA in NYC, Tim Street from SXSW next week, Podcasters Across Borders, MarketingProfs in June

Check us out on LinkedIn: John and Chris

Sign up for this Podcast in iTunes (and don’t be afraid to give us a review) also add the Gigadial Channel for more Podcasts

Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall 0:19
Marketing over coffee I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn and today’s marketing over coffee brought to you by our sponsors HubSpot and blue sky factory. Alright, so leading up today I had I did some stuff this weekend was talking some people like qR quick response these two dimensional barcodes, okay, and very cool stuff I will link to I did a post yesterday showing some of the stuff off. But the coolest thing I’ve seen with this so far is Topps baseball cards have this thing where in every pack that’s coming out this summer or whatever, there’s gonna be like one special card and you take it you hold it up to your webcam, and it registers the the code that’s on the card, and a three dimensional image of the baseball player pops up on So the card and you can literally see the three dimensional guy there. And there’s even games you can play where, you know, you can, they’ll throw a pitch to the batter and you can make them swing and hit it and you get full voiceover to when the player appears. So you get the voice saying, hey, how’s that work on a card? It’s on the screen. Oh.

Christopher Penn 1:20
That would be the coolest baseball card in the world.

John Wall 1:23
It was like the Star Wars hologram. Yeah, so I was thinking no just on the screen. And there was another campaign I had a video to another one too. In Germany, Mini Cooper, these guys did a thing where you would print out a two page sheet and it had a code on it. And then again, when you would hold it up to the camera, you’d get a three dimensional car on the sheet and little you move the sheet around and the car move with it. Hmm which is very cool. Let’s and and then talking through a more we came up with there’s a few other things people are using a little bit differently to the another way this is going to get used is these QR codes are a graphic that can get pumped down to your cell phone right and you You could go to point of sale and actually have it scan there. And you’ve got this rich coupon that has, you know, because it’s a 2d barcode, there’s a ton more information that can get put in it. In fact, even there’s some testing of these 2d codes that use color. It’s not just black and white. And they say in about a two inch square, there’s enough data in there, you could put an mp3. Really, you could scan for a song. Hmm. So all kind of pretty cool cutting edge stuff. And then the other and I guess this has been used everywhere else in the world, but us just about the idea of putting these codes up on billboards or posters, and letting people take a picture of it with their cell phone. Yeah. And then have that scanned and get directed to a specific page that has, you know, something specific for them, as you say, I don’t think

Christopher Penn 2:43
nearly as many people have a camera on the computer unless they’re a Mac owner, compared to the folks who have a camera that within their phone.

John Wall 2:49
Yeah, yeah, that was I’d seen some stats 80% penetration of new phones have cameras on them now. So pretty much the majority of phones have camera and then another interesting stat to Un tracks phone penetration just to kind of gauge the wealth of the globe and ability to communicate. And this is over 4 billion phones worldwide. Now that doesn’t surprise so yeah, huge and 86 penetration 86% penetration in the US was the market number. So, so yeah, check out the video live it is it’s cool stuff. And something new to play with

Christopher Penn 3:22
is the two dimensional barcode. Is there any, like an open source package that people can just play with to see just try and generate their own?

John Wall 3:28
You know, up on Wikipedia, there’s a couple links, and there is there are some diagrams showing how the data is stored. And because it has, there’s a whole schematic for it. As far as you know, there’s three anchor points and an adjustment point and then the data fits into certain stripes. But I didn’t see anything as far as generate your own or be able to do your own thing. So yeah, well, and there’s kind of a battle going on for who’s going to have the standards on that there are two or three different flavors going and people baking their own. So there’ll be a lot going on with it. Yeah, and I could see tools, not getting Because you’re gonna be able to make your own barcode probably, especially if people are doing promotions and like might not be something people want to get around there. But yeah, so a lot of stuff going on in the space is

Christopher Penn 4:11
very cool. So eventually whoever gets the first iPhone app out is the one who’s whose standard becomes the standard who runs. Yeah.

John Wall 4:17
And there is I think there already is one for qR, there’s another standard called qR me, which ties in more the ability for more web analytics, you know, you can link it right to Google Analytics and see what’s going on and where people are doing things. So a lot, a lot of movement over there. Let’s see. Okay, we had a comment asking about last week you throughout the tip on email tracking with the plus sign. And I think there was some confusion on how to use that, but I think was pretty straightforward. The idea was, you would have like if your email address was first initial, last name, right@gmail.com. You put first initial last name and then use the plus sign and you could use anything after write any alphanumeric combination after that, and it’s still Gmail will deliver it. So the idea was that, you know, if you signed up for some list, you know, at a trade show, you could use, you know, my name plus x trade show 2009 at gmail.com. And then you would know when your email is being used in other places.

Christopher Penn 5:14
And maybe it wasn’t clear, it’s the literal use of the plus sign the plus character on the keyboard, it’s not just, you know, appending, a word to it, it’s actually adding the plus sign in there.

John Wall 5:22
Yep, to get that. And so you could use the same thing for your own email blast to, you know, you can put an email into whatever email system you’re using to make sure that, you know, this specific blast doesn’t get buried in the rest of your inbox. Yeah, if you want to confirm what’s going on with that,

Christopher Penn 5:38
especially if you do any work with any kind of partners and stuff like that. You want to make sure your list is not being sold or abused in any way. It’s a great way to do that too.

John Wall 5:45
Right? Exactly. Yeah. They put in a couple of one of those white rabbits, they call us that report home and that way you’ll know And yeah, because if you have three partners, each partner can get an individual email. So if the list shows up later on somewhere else, you’ll know one of three lists that watch, you don’t have to just have an anchor in there, you can actually pin responsibility right back to the source. All right, we have another one come in asking you about StumbleUpon to generate, you know, it’s funny this is I had somebody else talking about this this week too. From the master over mesh culture dotnet, we’ll have a link to that, but was asking about how to use StumbleUpon.

Christopher Penn 6:21
You know, honestly, in terms of site traffic generation StumbleUpon is now a very distant third on my list of tools that are generating traffic. Number two is Twitter. And number one is actually have our own incentive program of sorts for students. If you go to scholarship points, comm and register there, you can then see, we’ll put up you know, read this blog post. And then at any of our sites and things, you’ll see a little bonus code and stuff, you know, take that back to the original site, put that in and say okay, you know, now you get five extra points for this drawing, whatever but I mean, I did that with an episode of the financial aid podcast and had about 1200 new listeners and this literally in about two hours. That’s how fast forward react.

John Wall 7:00
No kidding. So you really you have your own affinity program. Yeah. Ron and Jonathan deprogram. When people do things you rack up points for them. That’s pretty cool. That’s interesting. We could have to think some more about that. You could definitely use that if you get people that way every time. It’s not pay per post, but you don’t pay for surf. Yeah, but you could, there’s no reason why you couldn’t do something like this.

Christopher Penn 7:19
The only thing we’re not allowed to do is tie it to any kind of loan. Because there’s whole new laws about inducements and bribes and stuff like that. But the short of that, you know, read this blog post, listen to this episode of this podcast, and stuff, which we’re finding as we’re expanding out into into new markets and things, it’s very helpful for, you know, any kind of third party work we’re doing. So, you know, like Scott, Monty called me up and said, Hey, I need you know, 100 college students to test drive of, you know, whatever the latest model of their hybrid is, and I’d say okay, I’ll create a scholarship points opportunity for 100 Bonus points if you show up and you know, drive Scott’s car.

John Wall 7:55
Right, right. Take advantage that and so then when are you guys using the points or anything? Do they get Specific they actually use them for towards drawings for scholarships. Okay, but that’s entries into a contest. That’s perfect. That’s perfect so they just get the better your odds are the more stuff you get involved with it.

Christopher Penn 8:13
Exactly it’s but yeah then Twitter is the is probably the second biggest traffic generator for me because a lot of the folks who are following us close to 9000 now are are listening for usually financial or marketing reasons. So if I posting stuff about student loans, personal finance or marketing, it’s it’s on target,

John Wall 8:32
right? Yeah, those are all opt in folks. that’s highly highly qualified there too. You definitely can hit on that. That works.

Christopher Penn 8:38
Yeah, actually I that’s the key with Twitter is is if you have a if you’ve established a personal or professional brand for yourself, stick to it. And when no one really cares about what time you put your kids to bed or you know what kind of jello you eat but if you’re you’re sharing things that are actually useful, then you the people who follow you will will talk about you, the people who don’t follow you will hear about you

John Wall 9:00
Yeah, yeah, that is that is a great point. Because you have a lot of Twitter followers, you look at their eight posts, and you’re just like, Yeah, whatever. I’m not following that. There’s no meat there. Exactly. I have to keep that going. How about we had two people. We had Greg and Chris both writing and both basically the same question asking about career change. And so we had, Greg first asked, he says, There’s no in graphic design, web design, SEO programming for what about eight years? He’s really into online marketing, we’d like to continue to push his career in that direction. But does he have to go back to school for marketing? And that’s the the question and Chris, again, has similar question about having his undergrad marketing course he has an MBA, so he doesn’t need to go back to school for anything more, but was asking about switching from sales over to marketing. Base position. So and you know, first the school question, you know, how much schooling Do you need for this? What’s your thought?

Christopher Penn 9:56
Well, let me put it this way. I’m a professor and an adjunct professor of international At the University of San Francisco, I’ve never actually taken a course in marketing. I don’t actually hold a degree in marketing, I have my undergraduate degrees in political science of my graduate degrees in Information Systems. what turned out to what happened with the whole internet revolution is that technology became a form of marketing. So if you understand the technology of what it can do, then, you know, it translates pretty well as long as you can actually speak to other human beings, which a lot of technology folks can’t. But if you can, if you can figure out your marketing concepts and principles, and figure out how the technology fits in them, you’re ahead of 99% of the crowd. Do you need to go to school for it only if you have an employer or kind of job that requires an academic certification of some kind?

John Wall 10:42
Yeah, and the other thing I thought about that is, you know, because I did take it, you know, business background and it took probably three or four marketing courses, you know, I didn’t go minor in it or anything like that, but take some courses. You do get some great, a good foundation and a lot of things but the bottom line marketing has moved so fast that I think you would have to look at the program and see if the courses they offer are anything that’s going to help you now, you know, I mean, a lot of marketing programs are set up as if you’re going to be the CEO of Unilever with, you know, the day you get out, right, and they’re talking about huge, you know, you know, the the five P’s and you know, price product promotion, you know, as if you’re going to be making those decisions. And a lot of it is old school stuff to about surveying and direct mail and things like that, which also are not, you know, you’re not getting a lot of action in those segments. I mean, if you want a specific job of some kind, and you’re pointing to that, that’s fine. But yeah, I think in a lot of ways, you’re definitely much better off putting together your own course of action, because things have moved so fast that I think a lot of academia hasn’t had a chance to respond to it. I mean, there are some, and you know, I guess a good good thing on this too, is it just depends on your age, and if you’re a college aged, then and you know, get a college education, go do that and it focus in marketing and that’s Fine, but if you’ve been out for 10 years, I think the idea of going back to twitch seems like you know, not the right thing to do.

Christopher Penn 12:07
It’s very expensive to go back. I mean, I work at a student loan company, I see the, the loan forms coming in every day, you know, 5060 $70,000 for school, like, you know what I mean? Half the time and look at these these applications going, man, I hope you get your money back.

John Wall 12:22
Right, that’s Yeah, that’s the problem. If you end up doing three or four years, you know the payback on that and then you do three or four years and then you go into some entry level job, you know, you’re not gonna pay that back for 1520 years. So I do you know, once it finally comes through, so, you know, you either do it on the side and get somebody to pay for it would be huge or, or I can just pick, you know, the 10 courses you need and try and hammer through those in two semesters or something rather than losing a couple years.

Christopher Penn 12:50
You know, it’s a great book series is the portal MBA series. If you if you want to look at you know, like in the you won’t get the knowledge of an MBA on the cheap, grab the books, there’s some really terrific And it walks you through all the aspects of an MBA accounting and finance and all that stuff. And some of its deadly dry. But it is the best, you know, well rounded business background need, because there’s so much that some of the biggest problems people have when it comes to degrees and things is that they specialize in something so much they forget how the rest of the business works. And so they intentionally sort of shoot themselves in the foot. If, you know, if you have the general background of a decent MBA program, even if you actually haven’t taken the program, you are that much more useful to a business because you know how marketing interacts with finance, you know, how marketing interacts with sales, you know, how marketing interacts with it, or how it should and things and that’s really where you’re going to provide a lot more value.

John Wall 13:43
Yeah, to get and yeah, we should do that and probably do a post of the self MBA, you know, 20 bucks that would get you the same set of knowledge.

Christopher Penn 13:53
Exactly. The other single thing that a lot of professional marketers and especially advertising folks do that anyone and everyone I think should be doing, you can use a software like Evernote like this or whatever. But it’s called a swipe file. And if you again, if you don’t have a background in actual professional marketing, you may have never heard this but a swipe file, at least in the old advertising days is when you would, you know, literally get a pair of scissors out and just go through the Sunday paper and your trade journals and clip out all the ads and things that you thought made an impact on you and you liked now with everything online, I mean, if you get a great advertisement by email, copy and paste that you know, take that email and put it in a file, put it aside and then figure out what you liked about it. If you know that a certain promotion very well like if you go on marketing Sherpas website, they have their annual awards for email, copy all the all the things that have won awards and all the campaigns that have won awards and put them all aside so that you have a a really good reference files stuff that is useful and and as performed historically performed well, so that you know it, you can adjust your own marketing that way. You don’t need a degree to figure that out. Got to have, you know, two functioning or one function eyeball and a mouse.

John Wall 15:04
Yeah, exactly. No swipe files. Yeah, that’s a classic tool for anybody to run with. You know, I did think of one exception, though, for schools, if you’re on the shortlist of premier schools hmm that’s one thing because then what you’re not paying for book learning, then you’re paying for access to a network. Right? You know, there’s certain companies that hire only from certain Ivy League’s and things like that, especially the big brand companies, you know, if you want to go work for, you know, anybody that makes any kind of household detergent, you know, those folks, they look for people from certain companies. And so that’s where there is a return on investment, you know, and of course, you’re going to pay even more for those schools, the stakes are going to be higher, and you want to make sure you come out of those schools in the top half of your class and and do that, but those could pay off huge. Yeah. So so I’d have to give a shout out for that. All right, other stuff we had here. I’m Chris Baggett, from Compendium wrote back he left a comment in the block talking about his talk, but I want to try and get an interview with him. So I’m going to get back in touch with him. See if I can line up a time to get him on the phone and ask him a few things about how that’s working there. will email then said we’re huge in Melbourne so I don’t know well if they get the Australian tour together

Christopher Penn 16:11
here it’s dry there isn’t a seven or 10 year drought I think

John Wall 16:16
Yeah, well that in their what they’re heading into the cold season. Yes, sir. That’s unfortunate. I’m glad I’m not in their shoes had enough of this weather. Salesforce Twitter CRM tool. That’s big news this week that Yeah, yeah, that is you know, I think the news is much bigger than the impact that’s my personal feeling. You know, but it’s weird to I hit on a couple other fronts, too. I got some emails about some other social media tools after put some links to some of that stuff, you know, linking facebook, facebook to Salesforce I’ve seen what it used to be called face connector. I think it has a different name now. You know, that’s not bad, but it starts to borderline and creepy too. You know, I mean, when you pull up somebody contacted Following you like you see their favorite movies and then you call them like, I love that movie too, you know that that’s getting to be a little bit bizarre you have to you have to use some discretion and taste of it and we can talk about that all day and you know, the people who aren’t going to get it aren’t going to get so it’s just gonna be a mess. Hey, where’s the picture you bikini? Yeah, you know and people like looking at your family shots please lock down your privacy settings on Facebook, you know, protect yourself and your family.

Christopher Penn 17:31
Yeah, or better yet, don’t post it online to begin

John Wall 17:33
with. Yeah, even better yet don’t don’t give your pictures to Facebook. So they own them for all of eternity.

Christopher Penn 17:40
And so what is the Twitter CRM tool? Do it looks a lot like radian six and just sort of monitoring when your brand is being mentioned.

John Wall 17:47
That’s Yeah, that was the biggest thing I think and some of these plugins, just do the same thing. But when you look up the account, you know, so if you look up, you know, whatever, you know, Joe’s diner or whatever, you know, you’ll have a window that Has Showtime Joe’s diner tweets in there so you can get a slice of what’s going on? does it allow it? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve tested it now, but just allow it to tie a Twitter account to that person’s Salesforce account so that you can contact them by direct message if you’re connected. Yeah, I haven’t I haven’t had a chance to actually see I’ve mentioned it would probably because it’s, you know, add another object for a Twitter account name and have that in there and just have a link. You know, does that provide a huge value that they couldn’t just, you know, pop over one window and type that in? I mean, that yeah, that is a bit of a savings? I don’t know. I did. You know, I haven’t seen any real uptake in Twitter use on the sales side yet. You know, we did, actually, we did try it at a trade show did some twittering and it did have impact. You know, but again, it’s the it’s the novelty factor. You know, the people are coming by saying, Hey, I saw you on Twitter. They don’t actually have any interest in the business. They’re just excited that they’re playing around with the shiny object.

Christopher Penn 18:54
Exactly. That’s it. This is a lot of shiny object stuff. My wife was mentioning that I guess Ellen DeGeneres is was playing around on Twitter and stuff like that, like, that’s a great shiny object. Boy, I imagine the person monitoring that account has absolutely no idea what elementary

John Wall 19:09
that and yeah, they Yeah, they’re busy. Yeah, cuz that came up. I saw LeVar Burton and he, you know, had a little Twitter spat with Elon about who’s got the most followers or something? You know, she mentioned it on the show and now they’re both that you know, 90,000 followers, it’s crazy, you know, not even a year ago, it’s like people 5000 followers or like big deal or they’re in the top five list and now it’s like, if you’re not rolling with a couple hundred thousand here, you know, you’re just an average human.

Christopher Penn 19:37
The only person I know, a personal You know, I’ve seen and interacted with is that for sure does their own is MC Hammer. He’s got 270,000 followers now but he actually uses his account like it’s you’re not talking to some low level flunky who you know, in his organization is actually the guy behind the keyboard or the phone most of the time.

John Wall 19:56
Yeah, yeah. You know, he’s totally into it, too. He is. He’s definitely by into that, which is it’s cool. It’s just a new way a new way to talks. And but yeah, some of these accounts where they have hundreds of thousands of people. Yeah, isn’t that that’s, you know, they see the value on both sides. Yeah, I mean, a wide cast net.

Christopher Penn 20:18
So it’ll be interesting to see how Salesforce evolves that if it’ll become Okay, you know, this lead came in via Twitter, you know, for especially for like a big brand account, like, you know, the Comcast account or Scott Montes for accounts, if you actually get a lead into the system, then you can start chopping up some ROI.

John Wall 20:34
Yeah, tying it to, you know, because the hard part with that is, yeah, I guess you could create a record. I mean, you’d be doing it only by Twitter name, and you’re gonna have to back solve and figure out who the people actually are. You know, that’s the hard part. But yeah, you coded as it comes in the door and give it some points as it comes out. And so, but if it’s if it’s off of your existing base, you could certainly you know, load your existing sales database into Twitter, pull their account names and tie them back by email address. That was work, right but you know, those their names you’ve already got. So I mean, you could give him a pointer to for, you know the fact you had some interaction over there but you know, it’s not gonna I hear ya all comes down to that kind of moment of truth if somebody is actually using it at work and you Twitter them saying, Hey, what about that contract I just sent over, you know, is that gonna? Is that going to piss him off? Or is that actually going to move the needle for you? I don’t know. It’s a tough question. Let’s see, oh, ie eight, I got an email about that. They did some funny videos, you know, I didn’t even get the chance to go look at it was in my inbox. I looked at the feature list. Like it seemed to be stuff that you know, they’re catching up with Firefox on you know, it’s nothing new. So I actually had some weird I don’t know, you know, not a full malware attack but something funky got into my explorer and I was getting pop ups for screensavers and stuff like that when I started up my computer every time and after downloading, like five minutes anti spyware programs I totally blew out explorer and the problem went away. So I, that one just just killed me and Mike McKellen email then we had to give him a shout out he has. He’s done some stuff with Doubletree. They have a blog over there. And one of the folks that he works with won one of their big corporate awards for their best marketing programs. So give me a shout out for that. We had a couple people kicked back in on marketing survey tools to question on the week, three weeks later, right. Yes, exactly. You know, we found that the lead time on these things is is longer than the show cycle, unfortunately. But with question pro comm came up as a tool that you can use. check box, comm flypaper comm were three that were big. So let’s see. Yeah, and I think you know, I had a couple more things in the Twitter account, but we’re kind of already at the line here. So we have prsa. Coming up, we’ll be down in New York City. for that event, digital impact, we should have a link to that to sign up over there. So we have Tim Street from South by Southwest. You know, I’m gonna roll that next week because next week I have traveled so I will be off the grid. And we have a video of Chris from Boston social media jungle with

Christopher Penn 23:10
Jeff wolves event. So we’ll throw both those in the feed next week. So you’ve got something to keep you busy. What the heck else marketingprofs coming up in June, a lot of people coming out for that show. So Oh, I have to get a social event moving around that. And how about what else you’ve got? I know you’ve got private events coming up. Anything else? Yeah, podcasts across borders. We’re starting to send zoom in on a date for PodCamp Boston. The two dates even be like the first weekend of September and July the 19th. So we’ll see what happens with that. And I’ll be out in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the National College golf Sunday forum in May. So we’ll see how that goes. and stuff but it looks like it’ll be interesting, really interesting times ahead. So question of the week. Do you maintain a swipe file and if you do, what tools do you use to maintain it with?

John Wall 23:57
Oh, yeah, that’s good isn’t because you have to online stuff, paper stuff. There’s a bunch of different ways. So it’d be interesting to hear what people use for that.

Unknown Speaker 24:05
Yeah. Leave me Leave your ideas in the comments.

John Wall 24:08
That sounds good. All right, well with that, folks, yeah, we’ll be back with a live show in two weeks and then we’ll have some stuff in the feed for you for next week. And until then, enjoy the coffee. Enjoy the coffee.

Unknown Speaker 24:19
Listening to marketing over coffee. You can hear Mr. Penn daily at the financial aid podcast and read more at Christopher penn.com. Mr. Wolf blogs daily at Ronan marketeer.com and podcast theme show every Monday.

John Wall 24:37
The marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at the pod safe music network pod safe music network.com or follow the link in our show notes.