Ever wonder why every marketing project comes together at the last minute?

It never ceases to amaze me how many companies scramble to get their marketing projects finished at the last minute, sacrificing quality on a program because they're constantly in panic mode. Sometimes it seems like companies are needlessly throwing their marketing dollars down the drain, just because they can't plan ahead effectively. They pay for something, dedicate resources toward that project, then squander opportunities because they miss deadlines or don't do as much with the project as they should have.

Now I can't claim to be the most proactive person in the world. I miss plenty of little opportunities with my own projects -- for doing an extra round of testing on an email, for building a new feature that's going to impress a client, etc. -- because I didn't have enough time or give enough thought to the project in advance. There are plenty of times when I look back and say to myself, "Wow, I missed an opportunity there. I could've done that better." But I can't remember blowing a huge amount of money and effort on a project that went out the door half-done and way late -- which is something I see pretty frequently (way more often than I should!) in this business.

I always thought this stuff was common sense, but I guess it isn't. I'm not writing anything groundbreaking here, just a gentle reminder:

• Build a project plan and stick to it.
• Get buy-in from the key people in your organization who need to be involved, to make sure they understand how important the project is. If you don't sell the project's importance to them, they won't cooperate in a timely manner and you'll miss deadlines.
• Communicate effectively. Keep other people in the loop. If you're going to miss a deadline, at least let the interested parties know why, and let them know what you'll do to rectify the situation.
• Brainstorm with your team. Just give a few minutes' worth of thought to each project from a wider view. Am I missing anything here? Are there any opportunities for cross-promotion, or to use assets that have already been created?

If you're able to do all these things, you'll be a step ahead of most other people in this industry. (It's sad but true.)

What's the best day and time for a webcast?

Here's an interesting question blogger Ken Molay is asking. What day of the week is best for a webcast? And what's the best time of day?

He's doing a survey to collect data, because as he notes, conducting tests on this sort of thing would be difficult. I completely agree that gathering hard data from tests would be tough, but I think most producers of frequent webcasts could get a pretty good hunch for which days and times pull well, just knowing some of the variables that are in play (like how popular the topic of each event is likely to be). On the survey front, I also worry about whether people's actions of actually attending webcasts at certain times will follow their responses, because quite often, what people *say* they'll do is quite different from what they actually do. But it should be an interesting survey nonetheless, and it's probably better than the hunches all webcast producers are operating on right now.

In July 2007, webcast vendor ON24 did an interesting study that looked at a lot of different data points with key webcast trends. They examined things like months of the year for webcasts, plus which days of the week are best for registration. But they didn't dive into the attendance question based on day of the week or time of day. (Here's a link to a press release about that ON24 report, with a contact name on how to request a copy of the PDF. I couldn't find a direct link to the report PDF anywhere, probably because ON24 wants your name first so they can sell you something. But hey, ON24 is the best webcast vendor out there as far as I'm concerned, so let them sell you!)

Here's my contribution to conventional wisdom on best times for a webcast...

Last October, IndustryWeek did 12 webcasts in two days. We called it the "Operational Excellence Online LIVE" web conference. Sessions started at 11am, noon, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, and 4pm Eastern on each day (a Wednesday and Thursday). The target audience was manufacturing management. The majority of our audience is based in the Eastern and Central time zones, although there are still quite a few manufacturers in Mountain or Pacific. Overseas audience is generally around 5%.

Since there were lots of variables with these 12 sessions -- 12 different sets of speakers, 12 sponsors who did differing amounts of promotion for the event to their current customer/prospect base, 12 different topics of varying interest to the IndustryWeek audience -- it's hard to draw scientific conclusions. But in terms of attendee percentage, we can make some pretty good guesses.

We found that the first session (Wednesday at 11am ET) had the best attendance percentage. There were several others that had comparable numbers that were just shy of the first session's numbers, so I'm sure that's not statistically valid.

We also found that the 4pm session each day was by far the weakest in terms of attendee percentage compared to other sessions that day. This is despite the fact that both 4pm sessions had particularly good speakers and particularly interesting topics that are normally "hot button" sort of subjects for our audience. (We survey the audience after each session and ask them to rate each speaker, and out of 24 speakers for the 12 sessions, the speakers for the 4pm sessions were rated as the #1, #2, #4, and #8 presenters for the entire conference.) Good content, good speakers, poor turnout.

We had similar results for the 4pm sessions during our December 2006 multi-session online conference. Those two sessions underperformed from an attendance % standpoint as well.

As a result of these pretty convincing results, we've eliminated the 4pm time slot from future multi-session online conferences. We'll see how the numbers change in the future. Perhaps the 4pm time was too late for manufacturers, since a lot of manufacturing companies start and end their days earlier?

Lock up your web forms: Google has started indexing the "invisible web"!

Webmasters and web marketing managers should be sure to read a recent post in the Google Webmaster Central blog. Google is beginning to submit web forms in an effort to find additional content that resides behind them.

It's part of Google's effort to index the "invisible web" -- pages that aren't currently being spidered by the Googlebot. Up until now, when the Google spider hit a page that required you to fill out a form to continue, it would stop there. But now Google says that in some situations, the spider will attempt to submit the form so it can find out what's on the other side.

Is this good or bad? I'd say it's more good than bad. It's good for web searchers who use Google. And it can be good for webmasters and marketers, as long as you're aware of Google's new spidering policy and you design your web forms with the Googlebot's new capabilities in mind.

Take a typical B2B landing page. It's a single page with an offer -- let's say "Download our latest white paper on widgets!". But in order to get the white paper PDF, the visitor needs to fill out the form. Under the old rules, Google wouldn't be able to get to that white paper because it was housed behind the form.

But with this new initiative, Google might try to fill out that form and get to the white paper. Once it gets there, it would spider the white paper (because of course Google can index PDFs) and the white paper might appear in search results. So if someone types in "Widgets" and your white paper is relevant enough, it could appear high in the search results and people could be viewing it thanks to Google -- without filling out the form!

So if you have critical pieces of content like white papers that you don't want to appear in Google searches, make sure you exclude those form pages in your robots.txt file. (A simple Google search can tell you how to edit your site's robots.txt file.)

Webcasts: What's more important -- leads or thought leadership?

The April 7 issue of BtoB magazine has a graph with results from an online poll they conducted about webcasts. The question was "What's your top webinar objective?" and the two choices were leads or thought leadership. Interestingly enough, 69% said their top objective was thought leadership and only 31% picked leads.

These results really surprised me. I'm sure this wasn't a scientific poll, so perhaps I should take this data with a grain of salt. But in my many years of experience conducting webcasts, I'm accustomed to most sponsors being obsessed with leads. That's how sponsors usually evaluate success -- based on number of registrants and number of attendees, plus the quality of those people. It's just the way many companies are set up right now...they're dependent upon leads.

But after thinking about this poll, I realize just how difficult of a question "thought leadership or leads" is. A webcast needs to do both to be effective, so it's silly to say that one or the other is the primary goal.

If a webcast doesn't generate leads, it's going to be difficult for the sponsor to quantify results. How will sales and marketing turn that thought leadership into action without leads? But on the other hand, if the webcast doesn't provide thought leadership, the leads are actionable but they're not nearly as valuable. After all, there are a lot of easier and less expensive ways to get leads. But the thought leadership conveyed during a well-executed webcast, combined with the fact that the person just sat through an hour-long presentation about a topic, makes for a very qualified lead.

This is exactly why I believe webcasts are so popular in B2B markets right now. It's not about the lead -- nor is it about the thought leadership. It's an inseparable combination of the two.

Why Google's Gmail is able to overcome data and privacy concerns, to become the darling of the email world (and what we can learn from them)

Yesterday I migrated my personal email account to Gmail. I set myself up with Google Apps, so instead of having an @gmail.com address, I can continue to use my own domain name but have all the email managed through Gmail. (It's really a very good solution -- I'd encourage anyone who owns their own domain to look into it...whether you're a small business, an organization, or just someone who likes their own domain name for your email, like me.)

But when I was reading through documentation, blog posts, forum posts, etc. about setting up Gmail within Google Apps, I uncovered a major drawback to any person taking the Gmail plunge and storing all their email with Google:

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to migrate all your messages away from Gmail, should you decide one day that you don't want to use Gmail anymore. That's a pretty high "switching cost"...way worse than just having to tell all your contacts that you have a new email address. On top of that, Google has lost some users' mail, according to many reports.

But I still did it. I still decided to use Gmail. Why? Because Google has created a user experience that is vastly better than anything anyone else is offering. And this is where marketers can learn from Google.

A little history first: Previously I had been handling my mail through GoDaddy with a simple POP mailbox, and it did a nice job. I never had any problems, they had a webmail interface (although I tended to use Mail2Web instead), and I used Outlook Express at home to download and store all my email on my hard drive.

But the experience Google promised through Gmail was superior, and that's why I switched. Gmail's threaded conversations and tags make mail so much easier to manage. Its spam filter is so good that I've seen plenty of people who forward their POP email to a Gmail account just for the spam filtering. Now with Google Apps, you can get the Gmail interface but with your own domains and integration with Google calendaring, spreadsheets, etc. And Gmail also supports POP and IMAP, so they let their users check email in whatever way they feel is most convenient. (Although Gmail's interface is so good, I've been using the web version.)

So back to my "no way out of Gmail" concern. I did lots of searches yesterday and found plenty of people talking about migrating their messages out of Hotmail or Yahoo into Gmail, but I never found anyone trying to move away from Gmail. (Probably because Gmail is in style now, but I'm still a little surprised I didn't find anyone talking about going the other direction, from Gmail to another system.) There are all sorts of scripts and programs and techniques for getting your old stored mail into Gmail, but none for getting it out. Interesting, and a little scary.

I always liked knowing that I could export old mail out of Outlook Express, or Outlook, or Netscape Mail, or the various email clients I've used over the years. After all, when 2010 or 2011 rolls around and the next big thing in email arrives, maybe I'll want to make a switch. (And by then, hopefully someone will have figured out a way to easily get stored messages out of Gmail and into the next big thing.)

But look at the beauty of Google's underlying business philosophy here:

• We'll build a better email system, changing the paradigm for how people interact with their email. We'll make it so good you can't help but sign up.
• We'll serve ads alongside it...which is how we'll make our money.
• To expand our footprint and challenge the well-established Hotmail and Yahoo Mail brands, we'll extend our support to corporate users too.
• We won't make it easy for you to leave.

For most businesses, this final point could be a huge obstacle. Customers usually don't like being locked in like this. But why can Google get away with it? I think it's because what they're offering -- the vastly better email experience -- is so good that people don't mind giving up some flexibility. (Quick plug for one of my favorite blogs: If you're interested in the topic of how companies can create a better experience for their customers, check out Good Experience by Mark Hurst.)

So the lesson for all the marketers who want fiercely loyal customers (the kinds of people who will, for example, entrust years' worth of old email to Google without any way to easily get it out), the key is creating a customer experience that is vastly superior to what others can provide. Innovate to deliver a vastly better product at a significantly better value (which may or may not always mean a better price) than what your competitors are doing. If you can do this, you might have the next Gmail.

EST or EDT? Get your time zones right in your marketing communications

This is one of my pet peeves, but it's also something that should be important to marketers of all types. I can't even tell you how many marketing communications I've seen (webcast announcements, event emails, direct mail pieces, etc.) where companies get this wrong. And it should be pretty simple.

Whenever you're writing a time on a communication that's going to anyone outside your immediate geographic area, you should specify a time zone. That's obvious. But getting it right is a challenge for many marketers.

It's the second week of April. Let's say you're in New York right now. You're on Eastern Standard Time, right? Wrong. You're really on Eastern Daylight Time.

Back to Time Zone 101 class: The second word in the the time zone phrase is meant to express whether or not you're on Daylight Saving Time. So in the U.S., from roughly November through March (the dates vary each year), you'd say "Eastern Standard Time." But during the summer months you'd say "Eastern Daylight Time."

So many businesses get it wrong on their voicemail greetings, on the hours posted on their website, and many other places. They'll just say "We're open 9am-5pm Eastern Standard Time" and they leave that message active all year round. So what are you saying, your company doesn't observe Daylight Saving Time? Their message is wrong more than half the year.

Don't want to think about it? Here's the amazingly simple workaround. If you're only communicating with a U.S. audience, just say "Eastern Time." If you don't use that middle word, you'll be less precise but you'll always be correct. People should always know what you mean. (The only place that might backfire is in a couple exceptions like Arizona and Hawaii, the only two states where Daylight Saving Time isn't observed. A few U.S. territories also don't observe DST. But unless you're communicating specifically with one of those groups, the general rule applies.)

Now if you're communicating with a potentially global audience -- let's say a webcast -- you should make sure you're specifying Standard or Daylight. Alongside that, you should also list your offset from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the standard upon which all time zones are based and most people outside the U.S. should be able to calculate from.

So if I'm holding a webcast today (in April) in New York at 2pm Eastern Daylight Time, here's how I'd write the time:

2:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4, New York); or
2:00 p.m. EDT (GMT -4, New York)

Note what I've done here. I've told them the time zone (Eastern Daylight Time or EDT), I've also given them an offset from GMT (4 hours behind GMT), and I've told them the major city of the time zone (New York). With this info, just about everyone should be able to figure out when the webcast starts.

Of course be careful when you're doing this, because the offset changes from Standard to Daylight time. If it was December and Daylight Saving Time wasn't in effect, the offset changes to (GMT -5, New York). Remember, GMT never changes.

Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty simple. And I'm amazed schools don't teach this stuff -- or at least many people didn't learn it. You might look at all this and say, "But Michael, is anyone really going to get confused if I get EST and EDT mixed up? Won't they know what I mean?" If you're dealing with a U.S. audience, they'll probably figure it out and you won't have much confusion. But some people will notice your error. Why make a simple mistake like this when it's easily avoidable? You don't want to seem dumb in your marketing communications, do you?

So what's with the name of your blog?

So I've been asked why I selected "Digital Marketing Rucksack" as the name of my blog. Here's the thought behind it:

First of all, as I wrote in the description at the top, this blog is meant to be a "wide assortment of thoughts and tidbits for your eMarketing journey." I'm not planning to blog specifically on one focused area -- I want to jump around and write a little bit about what's on my mind as it pertains to eMarketing. One day I might be thinking about Google, the next might be email marketing, and who knows what will come after that. So that's one of the reasons for the "rucksack" part of the name -- because when you're backpacking or on a journey, you carry a wide set of tools and items in that bag, just like this blog will be a wide assortment of marketing tools. (Honestly, one of the names on my rejected list was "Digital Marketing Junk Drawer." I love junk drawers because there's always a variety of handy but often unrelated items in there. But the name just sounded too...junky. And I probably keep the junk drawers in my house neater than most people.)

Another reason is quite simply because I like the word rucksack. It just has a nice sound to it. It's memorable. It stands out. And most importantly, it's likely to be pretty darn easy to Google. With two ubiquitous words like "digital" and "marketing" in the blog's title, I wanted a word that wouldn't get buried on page 3 of the Google results.

But the true inspiration was probably one of my colleagues, Jon. A couple years ago, he and I were in a conference room with another coworker, trying to brainstorm new names for the Marketplace section at the back of our magazine. The Marketplace section was a collection of classified ads that included several wildly different kinds of products or services. I don't even remember why we were trying to come up with a new name for it. At first we thought of simple names like briefcase, portfolio, or attaché. But just like with all brainstorming, eventually the suggestions got more and more strange. At one point Jon shouted out rucksack and we all liked the word, but we knew it wasn't a realistic option. Ever since that day, whenever I heard someone say rucksack (which wasn't too often), I'd think back to that brainstorming session. So I owe Jon some of the credit for planting the seed that became this blog's name.

How much time do you spend fighting fires each day?

Today was a jam-packed day at the IW Best Plants Conference. (See yesterday's post for more). I heard a number of interesting presentations about how manufacturing companies can implement continuous improvement in their facilities. A lot of the challenges and solutions discussed today were of course specific to manufacturing, but there are some things that digital marketers can learn from too -- no matter what industry you're in.

During a session called "How to Create a Continuous Improvement Culture," David Rowland from Milliken & Company (one of the world's largest textile companies) talked about "firefighting" and how it's often a significant portion of an employee's day. How many "fires" are you putting out each day and how many crises are you solving, versus doing your normal job?

David said that the typical person in a typical company spends about 40% of their time on daily operations (the "normal" part of their job), and 60% trying to solve unexpected problems and put out various "fires." Milliken & Co. actually did a study a while back where it examined how its managers were using their time, and the numbers were amazingly close to this 40%/60% ratio.

However, he pointed out that the best companies -- like Toyota -- only spend 20% of their time on daily operations and 20% firefighting. So where do they spend the other 60%? Continuous improvement. They make their processes better. They find ways to reduce waste. They standardize routine decisions.

So how does this apply to online marketing? Well, just like the people in manufacturing operations, we can put processes into place that eliminate variability and waste. Whether it's a report your team puts together for management, a process for distributing leads to sales, etc., implement a plan to standardize these types of activities. As David said during his presentation, "People love their jobs when they need to make fewer decisions. They don't need to make many decisions when you have good processes in place."

But here's the tough part: no process is ever finished. Once you have the process in place, always look for ways to make it better, like Toyota does with its famed Toyota Production System in the manufacturing world.

As digital marketers, there are plenty of things we do that can't be standardized. But I think we underestimate the number of standard tasks we complete each day -- and you can apply continuous improvement principles to most of these. Standard practices will reduce the amount of time you spend "firefighting" and give you more time for the big, difficult, custom tasks you perform.

What marketers can learn by looking at a manufacturing plant

I'm at the IndustryWeek Best Plants Conference this week. More than 600 manufacturing leaders have gathered in Milwaukee to learn best practices from experts and their peers. Plant tours are one of the key components of the conference, so manufacturers can see other plants' operations and learn from them. Today I was the IW representative who captained the Miller brewing plant tour.

How much can an eMarketer learn from a manufacturing operation like Miller's? Two things came to mind as I went through the tour:

1. Digital marketers should follow the example of manufacturing companies that post their key metrics and list of improvement initiatives for all to see. On the Miller tour today, we went into the room where teams gather for 20 minutes before each shift starts. The front of the room is covered with at least three dozen graphs -- colorful, filled in with magic marker -- that show their key performance indicators and how each shift performed over the past month. They post info about productivity, safety, attendance, etc. There's also a couple whiteboards that enumerate specific tasks they need to undertake, maintenance issues that need to be addressed, and problems that need to be solved.
   
   We need to do the same thing as marketers. Too often we keep our numbers buried in a spreadsheet. Even if your metrics report gets emailed to the relevant people and they read it today, the numbers are quickly forgotten tomorrow. Try posting a board in a prominent place in your office that shows your key metrics and how you're performing against them. Reports and spreadsheets that aren't posted don't cut it...because they're too easy to hide and too easy to forget about.
   
   
2. You need to have a passion for what you do. We didn't get to see a ton of employees -- maybe a dozen over the course of the three and a half hour tour. But the employees we saw were obviously passionate about the 150 year tradition of Miller and its mission to produce great beer efficiently. I could see it in their eyes and I could hear it in their voices.
   
   When's the last time you felt passionate about an electronic marketing campaign? Sometimes we get caught up in the daily grind -- churning out one project after another -- that we forget what it's all about. I know I'm often guilty of that.
   
   Dig a little deeper. Make the extra effort. Spend the time to do a great job on the little details. Remember what attracted you to this business in the first place. And once you've finished -- when you've produced a campaign or materials that are really first rate -- kick back and crack open a cold one...just like they'd do at Miller.