The foursquare Engagement Evolution


As I interviewed candidates for GrubHub’s Marketing Engagement Manager position, the topic of foursquare came up often. Naturally so, as their platform popularized the application of game mechanics to develop engagement of users on websites and mobile apps. But what many people don’t realize is that foursquare’s engagement strategy is much more than badges and mayorships. The evolution of the product is a great example of a long-term engagement strategy.

So I had our job candidates walk me through what their engagement strategy has been from the launch of the application until today. Our interview candidates provided some fantastic analysis of their tactics with very little prompting from myself, so I thought I’d show case what I plus a few interview candidates described as the evolution of foursquare’s engagement strategy (portions of this program not affecting the outcome have been omitted for brevity’s sake).

Stage 1
Start Time: March 2009
Tactic: Badges
Target audience: Early adopters
Scenario: So, an early adopter has this app which lets him check-in to venues to let his friends know where he is. He’s out and about a lot and so are his friends. But most of his friends don’t use foursquare yet. So why should he bother? Well, early adopters value being the first to hear about and use new services. What appeals to them is status. Unlocked badges provide that status. Discovering badges before others create bragging rights. Since unlocking badges broadcasts that activity to Twitter by default, this serves as a great online sharing tool.

Stage 2
Start Time: March – May 2009
Tactic: Mayorships
Target audience: Early adopters

Mayorships launched during the same time as badges, but they play a larger role later in the diffusion process. After the early adopter and his friends unlock all of the badges, those badges cease to represent the status they used to represent. They also fail to reward checking in to the same place more than once. Mayorships are even more exclusive rewards that not only need to be unlocked, but also maintained by continuing to check in frequently. Mayorships also add an element of competition, since a venue can have only one mayor at a time. This competition and even more exclusive status keeps the early adopter coming back. Mayorships also serve another purpose. While they fuel online sharing just as badges do, they also are more likely to fuel offline sharing, particularly to the local businesses themselves e.g. “I should get a free drink here. I’m the mayor after all.” This is first reported as happening on May 26th of 2009.


Stage 3
Start Time: January 2010
Tactics: Special Branded Badges
Target audience: Brands, Early adopters, Early majority

Post-funding Twitter no doubt received some good advice form angel investor Jack Dorsey about the success brands were having on Twitter not only themselves, but for Twitter by driving awareness and new usage. On the heels of this, foursquare, thanks to its business development virtuoso Tristan Walker, started partnering with brands for branded, unlocked badges. The brands promote foursquare to new audiences (I doubt many Bravo! watchers were on the service previously), and brands develop a positive appeal with the early adopters already on the service. This tactic provides the early adopters with some much needed new badges to attain, as they have all the old badges, and mayorships have gotten too competitive in some cases. This tactic also provides foursquare with some revenue.


Stage 4
Start Time: April 2010
Tactic: Specials
Target audience: Local Businesses + Early majority

With mayorships requiring so much effort, local businesses wanted to offer rewards to those bestowed the title of mayor. Previous to this tactic, foursquare could add specials manually, but in April of 2010, they launched a platform for engagement of local businesses to create their own rewards within the foursquare platform. Local establishments could offer specials for the mayor as well as for other check-ins. This engaged local business, who saw an opportunity to create loyalty without a complicated system. This also incentivized check-ins for an early majority for which the non-physical, status-based rewards of badges and mayorships had little appeal, and who didn’t have a need to inform their friends of where they were. Specials make foursquare a viable one player game without using game mechanics.


Stage 5
Start Time: March 2011
Tactic: Personalized Recommendations
Target audience: Majority

As check-ins become a commodity, and as daily deals become more and more local, foursquare knows they can’t outdeal the competition for the hearts of consumers. But all of these engagement strategies are paying off, as foursquare has now amassed a large database of check-in data it can use to power a new personalized recommendation system. Instead of telling foursquare where you are, it can now tell you where you should go, based on your check-in history and those like you, creating a much larger value proposition than letting your friends know where you are.

Stage 6
Start Time: ?
Tactic: ?
Target audience: World domination

So with this next, yet to be defined stage, I asked our interview candidates to suggest where foursquare might go next to engage its user base in its quest for world domination. The answers were fairly similar, and revolved around the concept of the combination of steps 4 and 5 in a proactive way. One could describe it as push-notified, personalized recommendations for local deals. With the launch of Groupon Now, if this is where they want to go, they better hurry.

My Building Internet Startups Class Final Presentation: Cartogram

For Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky’s Building Internet Startups class at the University of Chicago, each student was asked to build a 5-10 page presentation for a new startup idea. Out of the 100 students in the class, seven were selected to be presented in front of the class. Mine was one of the seven chosen. See it below.

Cartogram: Internet Startup Final Presentation

View more presentations from caseywinters

Track Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself, or How To Track Your Brand Online

In my various rounds of speaking engagements on social media with my partner in crime Amy Le, I have been including a slide on general brand tracking/monitoring. This slide always receives a bunch of questions, so I am posting this how-to online so anyone can figure out how to track mentions of their brand anywhere and everywhere on the internet. Now, if you’re frugal, there isn’t one great system to compile every possible mention of a keyword across the internet. But if you use about four different ones, you can get everything.

Twitter

This is probably the section most people know how to do already, but it is where the most mentions originate, so I still include it first. Thanks to Twitter’s home page redesign, most users know they can search Twitter and see all mentions of a brand or keyword. Well, what if you don’t want to keep refreshing Twitter all day? Applications exist for all mobile and desktop platforms to notify you when new comments mentioning your brand or any keywords you want to track exist. My favorite of the free platforms is Tweetdeck, though Seesmic is pretty similar. Tweetdeck in particular also pulls in data from Facebook, Foursquare, and LinkedIn related to your accounts on those platforms, but is not able to scan data mentioning your brand on them due to the lack of public availability. Tweetdeck and Seesmic are available as desktop applications that can be hidden in your tray until you receive a notification as well as all mobile devices. Reply to people if it makes sense and retweet some complimentary remarks.

One note here: Neither Tweetdeck not Seesmic will remain free forever. It’s important to note that there are other players in the space that already charge and may be better suited for your more aggregate monitoring needs, such as SproutSocial, HootSuite, Radian6, et al. This post focuses on free apps, but want to make sure you keep this in mind.

Tweetdeck Search for GrubHub

Forums

I know what you’re thinking. People still use forums? Hell yeah they do, and you should know what people are saying about you on them. BoardReader allows you to search all forums for mentions of your brand. What makes BoardReader even more invaluable is the fact that you can subscribe to searches so any time a new mention occurs you are automatically notified. Just perform a search and click the “See Tools…” link at the top to subscribe. My personal preference is RSS (no, it’s not dead), but setting up a personalized home page isn’t a bad idea either. Jump in the conversation if you want, but do it respectfully and don’t hide your connection to your brand.

Blog Posts

There are numerous blog search sites. The important thing to remember is that all of them are good besides Google’s. My personal choice is Icerocket. Just do a search and click the Results RSS link on the left. Pop that into your RSS Reader or personalized home page and you’re set.

News

In reverse of my section on blog posts, Google News actually works pretty well here. Just search your brand and find the RSS link at the very bottom of the page. Rinse and repeat on the RSS Reader or personalized home page.

Backlinks

If you’re asking yourself what are backlinks, well, you should learn some SEO. Backlinks are the most important part of search engines’s algorithm. They determine the authority of your website. SEOMoz has a great post on using Yahoo! Pipes to track new backlinks.

Now, all of this can be applied to your competition, so if that’s important, replicate these suggestions with your competitors’ brand names for competitive research.

So, now that you know how to track it, what are people saying about you?

Data Mining for Media Buying (Media Buying Part II)

Read part 1 of of my series on media buying.

In my last post, I talked about evaluating the targeting options available in a media buy, and really making smart choices about how targeted you need to purchase your media. Now I’d like to talk about using data to enhance the media buying process at each step of the process. No, I don’t mean the incredibly irrelevant Nielsen data that you have to pay a bunch of money for, nor do I mean the statistically irrelevant traffic/audience measurement tools that are available for cheaper or free (Comscore, Compete, and Quantcast exist, but they are so wildly inaccurate it is not worth making decisions based on their data).

I’m taking about your data. As a business, you likely have some data of customer lifetime value, historical cost per acquisition of a new customer, conversion rates from paid media sources, and repeat purchase rate. If you don’t have that, use assumptions or make numbers up as you go a long (I’ll explain that in more detail later).

As I said in part 1 of this blog post, every vendor should be able to provide some data of theirs to you about a potential media buy. This typically is an impression number. Impression data basically amounts to an estimated number of the maximum number of people who would see your advertisement. Depending on how they calculate this data (always ask), you may want to adjust the number (if they use a very conservative methodology, you may want to multiply it. If they use a shaky method that is not very conservative, you may want to only count a percentage of it). If you’re buying ads on the exteriors of buses for example, some vendors may use the bus ridership data to provide impression data. Those people may be likely to see the ad before they enter the bus, but this data ignores all of the pedestrians and drivers who also may see these ads. Keep that in mind.

Once you have impression data, you also have a cost quote from the vendor attached to the buy. From this, you can calculate a CPM (Cost /(Impressions/1000)). This is the standard cost measure for media buying, so it’s good as a comparison tool. Frequently, if you’re buying different pieces of media from the same vendor, the impression and cost data is broken out by each type of media. This can help you understand what pieces of media are the most expensive and may not be worth the price (more expensive does not necessarily mean more effective for you).

Once you have this data, you can estimate how many people enter your store, visit your website, call your number, or whatever your goal based on these impressions. That should be your conversion rate. If this percentage isn’t very small, you’re probably over-estimating. For example, one media buying/targeting option might generate a million impressions. I could estimate based on previous buys (or just pull a conservative number out of thin air) that 1% of those impressions visit my website, and from there 2% make a purchase. That equals 200 sales. If you don’t have this data or are a new business, estimate using industry benchmarks or whatever forecasts you have (2% is the ecommerce conversion rate average, for example). If another targeting option using that same approach projects to generate 100 sales for the same price, it’s probably not the option you want to choose of the two.

200 sales?! That’s great! Is it? This is where you should look at how much you paid for those sales, how much you earned from those sales, and how many more sales you should expect from those customers. Cost per acquisition measure how much it cost to acquire each customer. This should be compared to the revenue/profit of that sale and the lifetime revenue/profit you expect from that new customer (if it is a new customer. Keep in mind an advertisement may just drive existing customers back). If those 200 sales or the lifetime value of those 200 new customers equal more revenue/profit than the cost per acquisition, you’re possibly looking at a media buy you can pull the trigger on.

If that is the case, from a negotiation perspective, you’re sitting pretty. You have a deal you can bite on, and can just make some attempts to lower the price to make it even more profitable. A good way to make that attempt is to pretend those 200 sales or their lifetime value do not equal more revenue/profit than the cost per acquisition of the buy. If this really is the case (or you’re pretending it is), you can use this data to arrange a price more to your liking. One thing salespeople are not equipped to do is argue with your company’s data. If your data says this buy is not going to be profitable (or you’re pretending the analysis says that), they have to assume they won’t receive the sale unless they make it more enticing. This is one component not covered in Tim Ferriss’s ad buying negotiation tips that absolutely should be. Salespeople are not typically very analytical, so even if there are holes in your data, salespeople are not going to question your assumptions.

Once you’ve negotiated a better deal using data, it’s time to collect real data on how the media buy is performing. Is it profitable? Should I do it again? These are questions I hear a lot from advertisers they can know themselves with a little planning. Most advertising campaigns (except for extremely established brands) are meant to acquire new customers. At any point of sale, website confirmation process, or phone call, you can typically set up your system to tell if someone is a new customer. When you receive a sale from a new customer, just ask how they heard about you. On our website, any time a new customer places their first order, we have a one question survey that asks how they heard about us, and the answers are pre-filled with our marketing mix. 70% of people respond to that. That’s pretty good data. All you have to do is tally up that data to see if you’re receiving enough sales to justify doing the buy again. You can also track if these customers make repeat purchases. Refine your conversion data and lifetime value data for future buys with this data.

Here is an Excel template that can help get you started.

Data can make media buying a regimented, almost automated process that can come close to guaranteeing profitable media buying purchases. So, I challenge any one currently purchasing media today, what data are you using?

Buy American, I Mean Remnant (Media Buying Part I)

This is part 1 of a multiple part series on media buying.

Someone from a company that will remain unnamed reached out to me recently. They were doing their first media buy and knew they were in unfamiliar territory. My original advice consisted of finding out the core components of your audience you think you can use for targeting purposes, and target as well as you can. An easy example is drivers. Solid approaches to reaching only drivers and not many non-drivers is to invest in interstate billboards and radio ads (oh, don’t give me that, you know there’s no reason to listen to the radio if you’re not trapped in a car). Being smart with your money means going after the type of media that has the customer targeting you want naturally built in.

So this person went out and received a quote from the vendor that had the targeting they wanted. It was a ridiculously high quote that definitely needed to be negotiated down. To cover those bases, I linked them Tim Ferriss’s guide to negotiating advertising, which I suggest anyone read through if they haven’t. What I also realized was a mistake in my initial advice. Targeting, up to a point, is certainly essential to making the right choice in media buying and making it cost effective. But it is only appropriate up to a point. If you’re targeting beyond just a certain type of media and are targeting certain parts of that media e.g. not just advertising on the USA Network, but doing it during Burn Notice only, you will pay a premium for requesting that targeting (if they can even do it. Traditional media can be incredibly unflexible).

When considering premium targeting, you have to receive rates with the premium targeting and without and compare the benefits to the cost. Some key questions to keep in mind when using this process: what is the value of the highly targeted media, and what is the value of the less targeted media? If the answer to the latter is zero, then of course you’re highly incentivized to pay for the premium targeting. If the answer to the latter is some percentage of the value of the premium media, compare that to the markup you’d pay for the premium media. It still may be more effective to choose the less targeted media.

An additional question to ask is, if I only choose the less targeted media, what percentage of my media buy will actually hit the more targeted media anyway? This may be hard to calculate, but you can use some common sense assumptions. Essentially, if you feel that many other advertisers are paying for the premium targeting, it would be low. If the media vendor has to check to see if they can do the targeting you’re requesting or if the premium targeting is a significant percentage of overall inventory, it probably isn’t being requested by many other advertisers, and your chances of hitting that premium targeting are higher.

Much of the time, when you run through this decision-making process, you’ll find you don’t need to pay for the premium targeting, but of course it depends on the situation. If you’re finding that you don’t need to pay for the premium targeting, there is an additional step you can take to create even more budget savings and/or increase the amount of media exposure you purchase. That is asking for remnant inventory. Remnant inventory is simply inventory that doesn’t get sold during an advertising time frame. This obviously won’t happen for extremely high coveted media like Super Bowl ads, but for most other media, they are at least a few impressions that go unsold and make the media vendor no money. Because of this, they may be willing to offload this inventory for a very low cost or maybe even for free.

What you need to consider is, back to the earlier question, what is the value of remnant media versus premium or untargeted media? In most cases, it is still a significant percentage of the premium and pretty close to the same as untargeted media from a normal buy. Depending on the medium, there could be zero or a significant difference in the quality of the inventory, so be sure to be sure to evaluate what the characteristics of a remnant impression are likely to buy e.g. for the USA Network, it’s likely not during primetime. But, it might be during Burn Notice re-runs on a Saturday and still hit the initial targeting you were interested in.

A common strategy is to buy some untargeted media and then negotiate any remnant inventory the vendor may have as a bonus. This doesn’t lock them into providing you media, but if they have a request for remnant from someone, they’ll fulfill it versus the media being blank. Since, in many cases, there is little difference between the quality of paid and remnant media, and since many media vendors have a significant inventory that goes unsold, advertisers can significantly increase their exposure with no additional cost. This is also a way sales people at media vendors can circumvent pricing floors without raising too much of a stink.

Excel can come in handy for evaluating the overall effectiveness of a buy that could consist of premium, untargeted, or remnant media, and deciding which buy to go after. My next post will go into more detail about how to use Excel and data to enhance the media buying process as well.

With Generation Y, Who Gets the Credit?

Okay, so if you know me at all you’ll know I’m pretty obsessive about music. In particular, I’m pretty into sampled-based music, i.e. music made using samples from other people’s music, film, et al. If you know me at all, you probably also know I’m obsessive about marketing. Those two obsessions don’t typically align beyond things like Bibio’s music ending up in the background of a commercial every once in a while. But I noticed something in my listening and in my work that I find startlingly similar, and I think it has to do with one commonality: Generation Y.

Bibio’s “Pewter In Grey” from his album Fi, 2005, soundtracking a commercial for L.L. Bean.

To back it up a second, let’s talk about where sampling came from. Sampling was born out of the DJ culture of hip-hop of the late 70s and 80s, where rappers would take an old disco or funk beat and rap over it. Rappers didn’t have the luxury of having full bands behind them, and a turntable and a sampler became much cheaper than a bunch of instruments. They might even re-use some of the vocals as hooks. Sampling by DJ’s helped hip-hop explode in the late 70s and 80s, and even revived many of the original tunes that were sampled. In many cases, sampling during this time celebrated the original source. It was a way to pay tribute to a song you loved.

Watch this video to hear how the genres of Jungle and Drum ‘n’ Bass were created from one 6 second sample.

A sociologist I can’t find the name of at the moment once said about Generation X that there most important question in life was no longer “why am I here?”, but “where is that from?”. It was important for Generation X to know and celebrate the source. Many times, the original artist wasn’t so fond of the tribute though, wanting royalties due to copyright infringement. This practice may have led to the change in sampling we see in generation Y.

Generation X grew up just as the internet was emerging, so everyone in that generation is used to finding books in the library to source for their term papers and newspaper articles. The concept of credit or tribute is very deeply ingrained in the mind whether it relates to music or a term paper or an article in a magazine or newspaper. The algorithm of the most popular search engine on the internet is based on academic sourcing, the concept that a link to another website is a list of it as a source. As members of Generation X became publishers, writers, musicians, businessmen, and artists, that concept remained in tact. But what about those who consumed the work of Generation X?

Generation Y has a totally different attitude. Generation Y grew up on the culture of Generation X, only with one difference, the immediate availability of anything they wanted with the internet. Many Gen Y music fans adore the the music of Generation X’s samples, without ever hearing the originals they’re based on. If a Gen Y person wants to read up on something, they don’t go the library and find sources. They read the Wikipedia and are all set. Now, as members of Generation Y become writers, musicians, and artists, sourcing seems to be lost. Generation Y DJ’s are more embarrassed than tickled if you ask them about the sources of their material, and they surely don’t go out of their way to make sure to give credit to their sources. I believe it was the musician and sampling magician Prefuse 73 who once said in an interview (for which I also can’t find the source and am paraphrasing) that kids these days don’t have access to what composers used to have access to. They don’t have a symphony behind them. So they use computers and samples to create a symphony of sounds they can use to compose with. They don’t consider their samples sources, just sounds. Prefuse himself is known as one of first artist of the “glitch hop” or “clip hop” in the early 2000s (terms I know he hates), in which samples are cut so short and so numerous that they are not easily referenced.

“Point To B” from Prefuse 73’s first album Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, 2001.

Publishers are as likely to be Generation Y bloggers than Generation X journalism school graduates these days. The former frequently take content from other sources without credit. Even on some of the most popular blogs on the internet, direct quotes are lifted from other websites without links/credit given to that original source. It happened to someone I know recently, on a very high profile blog. It doesn’t help that with the speed of the internet once a story is on one blog, in another ten minutes it will be on a hundred. After that ten minutes, try figuring out which is the original. It’s as if sources are so obscured to Generation Y that they have become irrelevant.

We’ve already seen the effects of this on copyright law. Lawsuits from big corporations are being filed onto in many cases teenagers. We’ve seen it with academics. Schools are banning Wikipedia or the internet in general as sources for term papers. We’ve also seen it with websites. Facebook has been accused of stealing features (and in some cases, code) from other social networks and gotten sued sued. Check-ins and group buying features are popping up everywhere from the original innovators of Foursquare, Gowalla, and Groupon, and the copiers are not even getting sued at all for it (and in Groupon’s case, many of them have been by bought by Groupon). But what about other effects? Will Google’s algorithm cease to be able to deliver relevant results without a tradition of academic sourcing guiding links on the internet? How will the behavior of publishers, musicians, artists, and businesses change now that they have no guarantee of receiving credit for their work?

How can companies innovate in a world where that innovation will be copy/pasted minutes later? How can publishers? How can search engines keep track? I certainly don’t have all of the answers, but companies seem to have the option to embrace not only public feedback on products, but also public work on products, either through API’s or open sourcing of code for website developers, to contests promoting improvements on products or brand new product ideas. An example of this is open source and collaborative work. People are working together on larger projects where there is no credit being given or no financial/artistic merit to be had. Just look at Wikipedia or Mozilla or content management systems like Joomla! or Drupal. Companies can embrace that (Netflix did with their recommendation system, though they did offer a reward. Guess what? A copier of someone else’s idea won.) For publishers and search engines, the proposition is a bit more of a conundrum. Spot.us is a new spin on the publishing model that may work in this environment, but the jury is still out. How will your job change in a world without credit? Are you or your company ready for that change?

Now, I’ll leave you with two examples of music sampling and rip-offs. First, a rip-off.

“Two Months Off” from Underworld’s album A Hundred Days Off, 2002.

“Days Of Our Lives” from Restless People’s self-titled album, 2010. Notice any similarity?

Now, an example of the complicated sample trail. Let’s source the sample(s) from the 1990s hit “Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check” by Busta Rhymes to see how hard this is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiVpSSkwPU4

Busta Rhymes “Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check” from the album The Coming, 1996.

Instrumental sample for “Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check” is actually from Galt MacDermot’s “Space” from the album Woman Is Sweeter,1969.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDZ_Uiu50Cc

Vocal reference for “Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check” is actually from Sugar Hill Gang’s “8th Wonder” (2:21) from the album 8th Wonder, 1982.

Instrumental sample for “8th Wonder” is actually from 7th Wonder’s “Daisy Lady” from the album Climbing Higher, 1979 (notice the reference in Sugar Hill Gang’s song title as well).

Taking Sales Lessons from Email Marketing

As a media buyer at one of the few companies in this economy increasing its media budget, I am constantly bombarded by sales inquiries. This has taught me a great deal about effective selling, just seeing all of things salespeople do wrong when they try to contact me. Then it occurred to me that many of these salespeople could become more effective salesmen by applying marketing techniques.

The most appropriate comparison between sales and marketing techniques is through the email channel. With email marketing, you have to acquire a contact (in this case, me). Then you have to figure out what that contact is interested in, how they like to receive that information, and how often they want to receive it in order for them to use your service. In sales, it should be the same way.

Typically, a salesperson is selling an entire suite of services. Their first objective should be to identify which part(s) of that suite their sales target is interested in. I can’t tell you how many salespeople have tried to sell me what they’re interested in selling in their product suite instead of what I inquired about. This will usually end up in them selling nothing to me. Good salespeople identify what their potential client’s needs are and tailor all future communications towards those needs. Now, this may be hard to know beforehand, but twenty minutes of research on a potential client will probably rule out half of a product suite. An initial conversation should be able to trim the potential sale down to one or two products. The rest of the information a salesperson shares with the target should only be about those products. They don’t care that the company had a big release of some other product they aren’t interested in. Think about it, Amazon is not going to email someone who just bought a book about a deal on kitchen appliances.

Once a salesperson has a contact, s/he need to learn what the best way to reach them is. This is pretty impossible to know beforehand as well, so like in email marketing, administering some tests and monitoring the results can answer this question. Send an email. Did s/he respond to that? Make a call. Did s/he respond to that? Leave a voice mail. Did s/he call me back from that? Like in email marketing, tailoring the communication to the contact’s preference (not the salesperson’s) achieves better results and saves effort. A salesman shouldn’t only be comfortable communicating in one way anyway. I’d recommend creating primary, secondary, and tertiary contact preferences for every potential and current client. By following those preferences instead of a gut reaction of how the salesperson likes to communicate will save lots of time.

My personal preference is to be contacted by email. I can review what salespeople are pitching on my own time, objectively, and be able to ask the appropriate questions in response after reviewing all of the information. This information about my preference should pretty easy to acquire for someone who administers the above test because customer service will not forward sales calls to me and will always recommend an email, even giving out my email address. Also, if someone calls my cell phone and I don’t recognize the number (or, many times, even if I do), I won’t answer. I typically don’t respond to voice mail either unless it’s urgent. Many times, if I do, I email back the voice mailer. If someone emails me though, they typically get a response quickly. Now, I should point out that a target communicating a preference is not an answer. Many targets will say “oh yeah, email me” so they can blow salespeople off. That’s why it’s important to try various contact methods and measure results, not just abide by what targets say they want.

I’ve had just about every salesperson I’ve worked with administer this test on me unknowingly, and it’s amazing how few of them actually monitor the results. I have one salesperson who will always call me, leave a voicemail, then send an email later. I have never answered this person’s call or called him back based on a voicemail, but I have always replied to his emails promptly. How much time would he save if he just emailed me first every time?

The third thing to do is understand the target’s timeline and when they want to be contacted. If they are interested in getting something done this month, then every day communication is probably acceptable and could even be expected. But many sales processes are much longer, in which case, a salesperson needs to develop a regular communication schedule based on their target’s preference. Trying to reach out to a person multiple times a week is likely overkill in this case. In email marketing, this is easy. Test sending emails at different times and different frequencies and measure responses. A salesperson can do this as well. Target not looking at your weekly emails. Scale it back to a month and see what happens. Now, this is probably more do to what a salesperson is selling than each individual target, so this is something a salesperson can test when they’re starting out and probably just apply to future targets.

Putting it all together after taking the time to learn from the potential client is not as hard as you would think. I had one salesperson who knew that the service his company provided was on our future radar but not in the current year’s plans. Instead of forgetting us until we indicated we were ready or until next year, this person would email me (my preferred communication channel) once every quarter (a good regularity for such a long sales cycle) with blog posts from his company’s corporate blog all related to needs I raised in our initial meeting (my preferred topics of interest). That’s smart selling that makes a potential client want to buy from you, because it shows that you listen to and understand them and their needs. With tools like Salesforce.com, this process can be practically automated, through email marketing even if that’s the contact’s preferred channel.

So, salesmen, take it from someone you’re trying to sell to, test various methods of communication and target your messaging toward each potential client and watch that closing rate skyrocket.

Abbreviate Yourself

So now that we’re out the silly web 2.0 naming conventions that defined websites for a while (did you spell Zillow right the first time you tried to go there?), we can finally get back to to a sincere discussion on brand names. Now, I’m not going to talk about what’s a good one, how to name your product, etc. But I will talk about what happens after you create a brand. It gets changed. Shortened. Abbreviated.

Abbreviations are created for numbers of different reasons. You can become a stock which forces a maximum of a four letter way to describe you e.g. GOOG. You can merge with another company, and since egos are always involved and no one wants to give up their namesake on a company, you initial the words of the two companies together e.g. BBDO. It also could be a marketing reinvention or an offshoot e.g. Gatorade’s “G” campaign, conceived not longer after the debut of their “G2” product line. Brands’ customers can also develop shortened nicknames for products at any time e.g. the Volkswagen Bug.

The danger of abbreviations in branding is a gravitational pull towards the generic. The shorter your brand name the more likely it is there are five or six other companies with the same name. This not only affects awareness and word of mouth, but also search engines. Can Gatorade really optimize for “what is G?” when it’s typed into Google? (no, but now some bloggers have.) And what is the answer? Is it Gatorade? Or Groupon’s rewards program? If you become aware that abbreviations are bound to happen, you can steer this trend in a positive direction for your brand. When McDonald’s decided to target younger people with ads in the 90s, it had young actors refer to the brand as “Mickey D’s” in commercials, which is 1) easy to remember and 2) easily distinguishable from other brands, yet still shorter than their actual brand name. If you type in Mickey D’s into Google now, McDonald’s website shows up first.

Thinking about this when naming your company can save you a lot of marketing headaches down the road and potentially create some opportunities. If you’re thinking of starting a company (or, just for fun, if you already have one), take a potential/your current brand name. Now, pick a stock symbol for it. Pick a name for a sub-brand that is related to the brand name. Now pick a shortened version for it. Now find a way to abbreviate it. Now search all of those terms on Google. If you’re scared by what it returns, you might want to keep trying brand names until you aren’t.

Is This an Interview or a Test?

I’ll split this post up into two parts, related to hiring for a position and interviewing for a position.

Hiring

When hiring new people for your team, it’s as important that you choose a candidate based on what he or she can bring to the table as it is that a candidate choose your company based on how well the role suits them and their goals. At GrubHub.com, we strive to design interview processes that don’t just test if candidates will be successful or not in the role, but also display what the day-to-day role will be like to the candidate, so that they know this is a job they want to take. The end result is that you should know pretty damn well whether the candidate will be successful in the role, and the candidate will know pretty damn well if this is something they want to do, or a company they want to work for.

How do you design such a process? I suggest that at every step of the process, you design tests that simultaneously test whether a candidate is competent and also display what you’re looking for the candidate to do. For a data entry position, this might be a typing test. For an analyst position, it may be a case study done in Excel. If candidates don’t like to type or use Excel, it will be pretty clear they don’t want the job. If you’re having trouble thinking of a test, perhaps the job requires more definition. It is also important to test this for culture. This can be more difficult, but smart questions around how they like to work can get you most of the way there.

Pretty much every job interview I’ve had, all companies have done is talked to me. They’ve never tested me on what they want me to do in the role. Thinking smart about how you can test candidates instead of just talk to them helps both the employer and the candidate make a more informed decision.

Interviewing

If you are a candidate for a position and you don’t know if there will be a test of some sort or not, refer back to the first half of this post and think of tests you would prepare for the role you’re about to interview for if you were hiring for it. Are you ready for those tests? If not, maybe you should prepare for them. If you are a candidate for a position and feel there may not be an actual test of your skills, there are some ways for you to create your own test and pass it to make the company know you can do the role. In some cases, bringing a portfolio of past work and presenting it is a smart play. For a sales position, asking at the end what are the qualities they are looking for in a salesperson and then proceeding to pitch yourself as having those qualities is smart.

As a candidate for an job opening, you should go into an interview with the goal of getting across a few points about yourself that should make you desired for that position. These points aren’t necessarily the bullet points of the job spec, though that is a good place to start. For example, maybe the position is a senior position you don’t quite have the number of years experience to justify, but you’re confident you have some other qualities those that would have that level of experience don’t have. Your goal is to convince the interviewer that that these qualities you do have are more valuable than the experience of others. Maybe it’s your intelligence or your creativity.

Someone who interviews you for a position should be able to come away from your interview with at least a couple points that clearly define you as a candidate, and you should define those pre-interview instead of hoping they find two that show you in a positive light toward others. It amazes me how few people do this. Think about this. If you are a CEO about to go on the Today Show to talk about your business, would you have a couple things prepared to make sure you get across to that audience? Of course you would, so you should do that for a job interview as well. If you don’t know what the points you’re trying to communicate as a candidate are before an interview, you should postpone the interview until you do.