Merry Christmas. There I said it. Even more importantly, though, I meant it. I wish every person reading this only the best in their life and I hope you find peace, joy and true purpose in your life. I did not write this to be confrontational or controversial, just true to who I am. Despite all the talk of internet marketing and small business my life is not centered on that. It’s important but it’s not the reason to get up in the morning. Tell me about your reason for getting up in the morning. I would love to hear it. Please don’t be shy and know that political correctness is not an endearing quality here .

I am going to take a break until the start of the New Year. I won’t bore you with the reasons. I will start posting again on or around January 2, 2009. My goals for Frank Thinking next year are:

1. To write fewer words but convey more meaning
2. To get to know my readers for real
3. To provide information that can be turned into action
4. To give real life examples of SMB internet marketing success (your suggestions for profiles and / or interview subjects are welcomed)
5. To see a true community grow via my blog as well as through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Not real lofty goals, in my opinion. Of course, there are concerns about the economy and many other ‘things’ that are completely out of my control so I choose not to dwell on them. These too shall pass.

Thank you for checking in and paying attention to what’s on my mind. Thank you also to Andy Beal and Mike Moran who let me write for them and share with their audiences. It’s good to have friends.

Well, 2008 has passed for the most part and I can say that I am truly blessed. My prayer is that you can say the same and if you can’t, to know that it is available to everyone regardless of your station in this life.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. May God bless you and yours. See you in January.

Hearing a search marketer like myself talk about internet marketing for SMB’s has some benefit or else I wouldn’t do this. I do sincerely believe, however, that the most important voices for anyone to hear, whether you are a search marketing service provider or an SMB that is using or thinking about using internet marketing more effectively, are those who do this stuff and apply it to their business / work.

Heather Smith, Marketing Project Leader for ActiveStrategy near Philadelphia, PA was kind enough to answer some questions about how ActiveStrategy integrates the internet into its marketing efforts. In the interest of full disclosure ActiveStategy is a client that I have worked for with my company and had worked with them through another search marketing provider in the past. I feel that they are a “classic” SMB business that sees the value of internet marketing but has learned how to be realistic about it. Read on and learn more.

FR: Could you please tell us a little about ActiveStrategy’s offerings?

Heather: ActiveStrategy provides web-based Balanced Scorecard software, as well as strategic business consulting, to help organizations execute strategic plans, turn them into actionable items, and measure their performance. Our software, ActiveStrategy Enterprise, allows organizations to align all employee activities to critical strategic objectives, drive accountability, discover the root causes of performance problems, and fix them before they become larger issues. We also offer a series of educational seminars that provide executives hands-on, practical instruction on various performance management methodologies.

FR: What forms of internet marketing are you currently doing for ActiveStrategy? (Pick from SEO, PPC, blogging, social media etc).

Heather: We leverage SEO, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, blogging, and free webinars in order to generate leads for our consulting services, to create demand for our software, and to drive people to our events (annual conference, seminars, and webinars).

On our website, we offer not only information about our products and services, but also free resources for people just starting to learn about performance management. We use SEO to optimize those pages for high search engine rankings because we believe that educating someone about performance management methodologies is one way to turn them into a potential client.

We offer webinars like Balanced Scorecards: Fundamental Concepts, Performance Excellence in Government, and Driving Aligned Improvement in Hospitals – some appeal to those just learning about Balanced Scorecards, and others appeal to specific industries. We follow up with webinar attendees to see if they’d like a web demo of our software, or if they’re interested in attending a seminar. We try to integrate our online marketing efforts in this way – they’re integrated with each other (we advertise webinars on our website, online event listings, and through email campaigns), and they’re integrated with our sales process (sales people are following up with the webinar attendees).

Last year, we started our own blog, “The Glue, a Guide to Executing Business Strategy,” as a vehicle for communicating our domain expertise. We also comment on blogs about Balanced Scorecards and other performance management methodologies.

Although we meet a lot of our leads at conferences and other live events, online marketing is an important part of our strategy.

FR: How do you define success for these campaigns? Lead generation? Actual sales? etc

Heather: Determining success for some of our campaigns is subjective right now. Because our blog is still relatively new, we don’t have a defined number of leads we hope to drive to our corporate website from the blog each month. I personally am happy when we get a handful of leads who visit our website after spending time on the blog. These visitors generally spend 1 to 5 minutes longer on our website than the average visitor.

Certainly some campaigns are concretely more successful than others. If we get 2% of an email list to register for a webinar, that’s a success. If we get a 0.1% click rate, we’ll go back, refine the message and look of an email, and try again.

In the past, we have concentrated more on driving high volumes of somewhat qualified traffic to our website, whereas now, we are more concerned with obtaining higher quality sales leads. As we continue to use lead scoring, we’ll be able to pass along highly qualified leads to sales, and we should see a direct correlation between our marketing efforts and revenue generation.

The point is, there is no magic bullet when it comes to our online marketing. We are in an industry that requires a lot of touch points before a prospect becomes a sale. But we recognize that in order for people to do business with us, they need to find us, which is why we’re big on SEO and SEM. I’m sure that the fact that we offer web-based products helps us get the money to spend on these initiatives, whereas other small-to-medium businesses (SMB’s) might have less understanding executives.

FR: What exposure do the internet marketing efforts get in the company? C-level? VP? Director?

Heather: We track the status and results of campaigns in our own software, and review this information with management at monthly business reviews. This ensures that our marketing efforts align with our corporate strategy. If one of the objectives set by management is “expand Healthcare business,” we ensure that our online marketing efforts target this objective. We’ll optimize our healthcare-related web pages, send e-blasts to our healthcare prospects, run a healthcare webinar, etc.

All of the employees in the company are aware of most of the online marketing we do. Our employees receive our email blasts so they know what event we’re promoting. We also ask that every employee include a link to our blog or to information about an upcoming seminar in his/her email signature. We try to use all touch points with clients or potential clients as opportunities to impart positive brand messages.

FR: What areas have been the most / least successful? Why?

Heather: The blog has been successful in driving leads back to our corporate website. Since we offer best practices, tips, and success stories, readers seem to be enticed to check out our product offerings.

Our SEO efforts have helped us maintain high search engine rankings for important keywords, and move up to the first page of results for keywords we are just realizing are important to our business. For example, we started optimizing for the term “strategic business consulting” back in December. We used to be on the 2nd or 3rd page of results on Google, and now we’re consistently in the top 5 organic results.

Webinars have also been a successful online marketing tool for us. Our email and website promotions of these once/month or twice/month events have consistently garnered high numbers of leads for our sales team, and have helped persuade people to go a step further and attend one of our seminars.

FR: How has outsourcing your search marketing worked for you?

Heather: We haven’t always had positive results from outsourcing our search marketing. We have gotten lost in the shuffle at more than one firm, and we’ve found that much of the work that’s been done for us is stuff we can do in-house. However, outsourcing this job has been a time-saver for us since SEO does require serious, on-going attention. In a very small marketing department, sometimes this just isn’t possible.

FR: What areas of internet marketing or social media are you currently examining (if any) for future involvement?

Heather: We have begun using software to “nurture” leads, and we are going to begin drip marketing in the coming months. Lead nurturing and drip marketing will help us move prospects along our very long sales cycle, and will allow us to qualify/score leads, passing only the most qualified on to our sales team. We are going to be using email for our drip marketing campaigns, sending deliberately timed informational materials, white papers, case studies, etc to prospects in the hope that we’ll stay top-of-mind with organizations that are considering a Strategy Execution or Balanced Scorecard project in the future. Drip marketing should be a powerful tool for us because our products/services require a “right time to buy” – we hope that our prospects will turn to us when they’re ready for software or consulting for their performance management project.

FR: What recommendations would you have for other small to medium businesses who are going up against larger players?

Heather: Be realistic about what defines a successful campaign, be smart about how you spend your money, and be flexible. I used to work for a (wealthy) entrepreneur who only cared about being 1st in paid search on Google. He didn’t care that, despite the marketing department’s protesting, we were spending $1,000/day to get and stay there. He read a book about the importance of being #1 of Google, and that became his only strategy. It’s simply not realistic or smart. We would have done better to hire an outside company to help us raise our organic search rankings, and we would have spent thousands less. But again, because we had a large marketing department, he wanted to do everything in-house. However, our time would have been better spent developing creative campaigns rather than monitoring PPC ads. At ActiveStrategy, everyone understands that spending money to achieve online marketing success is necessary, but we are smart about how we spend it. Email marketing is cheap and can provide immediate “success” – webinar sign-ups, seminar registrations. PPC is expensive, so we monitor the success of our PPC campaigns and adjust ads and budgets accordingly.

FR: Thanks, Heather!

Heather Smith Bio: As the Marketing Project Leader at ActiveStrategy, Inc., a Balanced Scorecard software and strategic management consulting company outside of Philadelphia, Heather is responsible for online marketing efforts, including SEO, SEM, and email marketing. In her previous position as a Product Marketing Manager at a multifaceted international organization, she developed and executed web marketing plans for three lines of business (managed care, manufacturing, and computer hardware).

Recently I have had the pleasure of getting to know Chuck Hester, director of corporate communications with iContact. Many of you may already know him or may even be LinkedIn to him via the popular professional networking site LinkedIn. Chuck has become a LinkedIn “guru” of sorts. His use of the site and its capabilities have helped him land a great job, meet a ton of folks and even helped others get work as well. His “Pay It Forward” mantra is one that we can all take a lesson from. Here is Part 1 of an interview we did to help you learn more about Chuck, his use of LinkedIn and the power of social networking.

FR: Chuck, how did you start with LinkedIn and what was the result?

Chuck: I started using LinkedIn in 2005 when I was considering relocating from Los Angeles to the East Coast. I connected with about 37 Raleigh-area marketing and PR professionals in hopes of networking for a new position.

FR: How has LinkedIn contributed to your success in recent years?

Chuck: As a direct result of networking on LinkedIn, I met iContact CEO, Ryan Allis. We connected at the time I was looking for a job and he was looking for a Director of Public Relations for iContact.

FR: Not a bad ROI! Moving forward how do you envision using LinkedIn as a tool for your work?

Chuck: I use LinkedIn in several ways:

1. I connect with media and other influencers to further the reputation and the reach of iContact as a brand. I can directly track back LinkedIn connections to media coverage we have received as a company, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Fast Company
2. My network includes people who help me build up my personal brand as well – as a speaker, LinkedIn guru and Pay It Forward advocate
3. Through LinkedIn, iContact has sourced several business partnerships that have resulted in increased sales and revenue for the company
4. Finally, I have been able to “Pay it Forward” through LinkedIn and helped individuals find jobs in over 20 companies locally and throughout my network.

FR: That’s some serious mileage from one venue. Does LinkedIn ever contact you or talk to you at all?

Chuck: I have worked with the public relations manager at LinkedIn as she sources stories on using LinkedIn to find a job.

FR: What high level suggestions do you have for new LinkedIn users regarding their strategy and expectations using the tool?

Chuck: My best advice – always be personal on LinkedIn. Treat your connections like they are standing right in front of you. If you met someone at a business function, how would you act towards the? Just because you meet online and not in person, doesn’t mean they aren’t important.

Also, never use generic information. Be upfront and honest. Take the time to get to know something about a potential connection and find areas of common interest or ways you can potentially help them.

Finally never go into a LinkedIn relationship expecting something immediately. It may not be that connection that will help you. It could be someone else they know, or someone three degrees away from your new connection.

FR: Thanks for your time, Chuck. Make sure to let your connections know about this post!

There is more from Chuck that I will post in the very near future. Check out his bio below to find out more about this master networker.

Chuck Hester is Director of Corporate Communications at iContact, the industry-leading web-based emarketing communications software. Chuck has over 25 years experience in public relations, marketing and branding, with stints as an in-house marketing director, and public relations director for two marketing agencies. Some of the clients Chuck has worked with include TEAC, Western Digital and the Department of Defense Technology Transfer Program.

A LinkedIn power connector, Chuck has more than 7000 direct connections. He is a sought-after expert on the subject of using LinkedIn for personal and professional branding, and how to use social media to build business contacts.

Chuck is the host of LinkedIn Live Raleigh, an in-person networking group that brings together more than 300 professionals for networking in the Triangle.

A published author and blogger, Chuck also teaches marketing and public relations for Duke University’s continuing education department and has taught at the University of Irvine, California. He holds degree in Journalism and Communications from the University of Southern California

I have had the pleasure of getting to know an incredibly knowledgeable and experienced marketing professional, Tony Rysinski, over the past few months. Since starting my blog Tony has been checking in and he has sent along his thoughts on the post of March 26, 2008, Search Marketing and Caveat Emptor. Tony’s bio appears at the end of this post. Thanks to Tony and I look forward to bringing my readers more expert opinions in the future. Here’s Tony’s take.

Frank, thanks for your thoughts. I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. I’d like to add that what I’ve found as a healthcare marketing practitioner is that the web is still in its infancy and there exists a great fear and skepticism of the unknown. Marketers regularly spend large chunks of their budget allocations on traditional media including direct mail, yellow page advertising, trade shows and the like. The web and search engines, in particular, still are a mystery to many.

As such there is concern about testing these new waters. Like any test, you have to put controls in place to assure you’re getting a true read. You also need to allow time to allow it to work. As a relatively new media, the web is held to a much higher standard. Remember direct mail. Everyday people send out tons of mail with the hopes of a one to two percent response. For every 100 pieces sent you’ll get one to two people to respond and when this happens you throw a big party. Cut this number in half again and you have your total sales resulting from the 100 contacts.

Bottom line is that search engines work. If you do your search engine work correctly, you are likely to find different dynamics in the numbers. With the web, you have a captive audience. People, prospects are specifically looking for what you have to offer. They are serious and focused. But to make it work, you need a process in place. Like all marketing, you need to dedicate the budget and the staffing to be effective. In many cases, search engine responsibility is thrown to an overtaxed web manager. If you want to get serious with this new medium, you have to get some skin in the game. Marketing professionals need to be heavily involved in search engine management, just like you would with a direct mail campaign or trade show development.

But, I’m here to say there are rewards in terms of cost per lead, cost per sale, the data accuracy associated with self-service, and, most importantly, you are doing business on the new consumers’ terms. With the web, you’re there for your prospects when and where they want you. So jump right in, the water is warm and welcoming for those who dare.

About Tony Ryzinski

Tony has a deep and diverse background in the healthcare industry, holding senior-level marketing & communications positions for leading brands in the payer, provider and HIT industries. Tony’s experience includes SVP of Marketing for a leading HIT organization, Misys Healthcare Systems; VP of the health insurer of choice and market share leader, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina; and AVP of the Philadelphia region’s then-largest healthcare system, Graduate Health System. Having been on the client side, working with many of the best-known and respected consultancies in the world, Tony offers an informed understanding of the pressures clients face. His focus is on making the consulting experience simpler and easier as he assists clients in reaching their goals.

Tony’s areas of expertise include brand creation and management, organization design, strategic and marketing plan development, and B2B and B2C advertising and direct marketing. His experience spans start-up, turn-around and growth marketing strategies. His work has been highlighted in trade and consumer press, and he’s presented at a variety of academic and industry organizations. A native of Philadelphia, Tony received a BA in Communications from Temple University.