Ok, so we should do inbound marketing, but what about security?

Fresh from Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, I am all pumped up and ready to start drafting a new social media strategy for my company and my clients. Afterall, the speakers like Brian Solis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jason Falls, Chris Brogan, etc. (Complete list here - omissions not intentional) are just too awesome to ignore, it'll be a crime not to follow.

Several emails with clients and colleagues later, however, made me realize that as much as brands want to run out there to engage their customers and prospects, they are also concerned with data security. It is not just allowing their workers to go on facebook, linkedin and twitter at work, as brand marketers we must also educate them with all the security risks that they are exposing the brand to.

With that said, brand must set forth guidelines to draw boundaries on what their employees can and cannot say online. While verbal conversations are off-the-record, online social media communications are all recorded on the server, which means everything the employee says about the brand online are on-the-record.

Furthermore, just as I have blogged about how hackers picked up #ims09 hashtag on Twitter and spam the channel with adult materials, same risk holds true for the brand and their social media channels. Tests has been done by security experts that hackers can utilize these channels to create fake identity of the brand, connect to employees and send out fraudulent connection invites and email attachments that penetrates the corporate network.

So not only do brands need to allow their employees to utilize social media channels to listen to the customers and engage them, they must also be properly educated on how to properly spot security threats. Email attachments, links are among the most common method of hackers penetration. Always be alert of incoming network attack via these channels will keep your brand data safe and help you reach out to people the way social media was meant to do.

reBlog from cliqology.com: Spammers attack the Inbound Marketing Summit #ims09 Twitter Stream

In the world of Twitter and technology conferences, where hundreds of attendees use twitter to broadcast updates, notes, and thoughts based on a dedicated hashtag, spammers are right alongside waiting for the right moment to attack. Yesterday at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, the hashtag #ims09 became one of the top trending topics in Twitter. Without 3 hours spammer use this hashtag and began spamming. Below is a link to the blog that described the event by the minute:

Yesterday, Spammers attacked the Inbound Marketing Summit (#ims09) Twitter Stream.cliqology.com, Spammers attack the Inbound Marketing Summit #ims09 Twitter Stream, Oct 2009

One one hand, spam like this is really annoying is doesn't contribute to the conversation. On the other, it shows how spammers pay attention to the trending topics and react immediately.

With that said, how much attention are you paying on your brand? Are you paying as much attention to your brand as these spammers? Are you grabbing every opportunities made available to you online to engage your customer in a positive way? Obviously, I'm not advocating spamming, but rather the level of attention we must pay when it comes to our brand. Engage people who are talking about you, look for them, listen to them, and respond to them immediately.

Inbound Marketing Summit Thoughts

I am going to interrupt my previous promise to write more about email marketing tools. But since I am currently at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, I would like to share with all of you about what Inbound Marketing really is.

First of all, most current popular marketing channels such as TV ads, radio, banner / pop-up ads, even many Email marketing and social media ads are considered interrupted marketing. This form of marketing is considered interrupted method because it pause the user from their routine and force them to respond to your messages. While I see this form of marketing to continue, the newer form of Inbound Marketing is gaining a great deal of growth and expansion because it attracts users and prospects who are already looking for information about your message to come find you. And this form if marketing is about listening to what users are saying, locating where these conversations are taking place, and engage them with your creative content.

While the earlier form of marketing unique utilize market research to locate the best channel to distribute your message and measure penetration of your message by eyeballs and impressions. With inbound marketing, research on channel is replaced by locating where the listeners are, what they are saying about your industry and products, and distribute multiple messages by engaging in conversations and coming up with interesting content. Measures of success is engagement. Is about how many readers and users you can engage in conversations.

This is where social media channels comes in. Even the PR industry is shifting their focus on chasing after media channels to attractive them via viral content on social media. So the strategy for many companies is not on hiring PR firms that distribute news, but rather to hire content generation experts in their industries and engage in conversations that will bring in traffic and sales.

I will try to be more specific in subsequent posts and maybe locate some firms that can really help companies succeed in this form of marketing.

HTML email doesn't look the same in Outlook, Entourage, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

This topic is by no means new. As a matter of fact, most of you who has experience designing HTML email know this already: The way different email clients understand and render HTML codes are very different. For starters, here are several points I've taken from my experience along with this article from sitepoint: How to Code HTML Email Newsletters.

• Use HTML tables to control the design and layout and set all cellspacing and cellpadding to 0.
  
• User Inline CSS only.
• Avoid custom margin and padding properties for inline CSS.
• Breakout all CSS individual properties, avoid shorthand CSS.
• Do not use background images (Gmail don't display them).
  
• Do not use line-height properties (Outlook and Hotmail don't understand them).
• Specify all image height and width (Outlook 2003 and Outlook web access with image off will break the layout).
• Add "display: inline;" on all images (Hotmail and Outlook 2003 will add default spacing on them).
• Avoid defining table cell width using percentage value.
• Avoid using div elements to define overall layout.
• No Flash elements and javascript elements.

As you can see, there are a lot of things to consider when it comes to design an HTML email. But to ensure compatibility across all email clients, you can utilize email testing services like Litmus (One time, monthly or free) where you can test your email on Gmail and Outlook 2003 for free, and a lot more for their paid services. Another service you can check out is Campaign Monitor with similar functionalities. (Disclaimer: I'm not endorsing any of these products, they are only used as examples).

Next time I'll talk a little bit on inbox penetration and delivery systems, and maybe a bit more about social media and emailing.

Start connecting your business on Twitter

Yes, I admit, this is not entirely original. Thousands if not millions of people have said this already. But the importance of outreaching to potential customers using social media can't be ignored. So here it is again.

Many consumer-oriented corporations and brands has already started their social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, etc. But the concept remains largely non-touched by small- and middle-market. The core problem is perhaps not how to make connections, but what do you do with them?

For those of you who are still rather lost in the "Twitter for Business" concept, you should consider reading Twitter 101 for Business to get started. What for those of you who knows Twitter already, you have to focus on more than telling them what morning cup of coffee is making you sick.

Bottom-line: Content. A big list of followers may seem impressive, but are you really connecting with them with content? Sure, the 140 characters limit will limit what you can say, but it is this very dynamic that made Twitter so popular. Users can go through a short list of topics on their screen (much like reading news headlines on cnn.com or cnbc.com) and pick what they want to read about.

Then is the usefulness of the content. You have to think like your follower when you write. I've read so many twitter post that talk about what the business has accomplished and what client they've recently gotten. But that simply doesn't interest me as a follower anymore. I've much rather read about something insightful that can benefit me as a reader. Just remember, you're no longer "pushing" content like you used to on TV, radio, magazine and website. Social media involve "pulling" people to your content.