One of Washington’s Best!

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News

Projectline is proud to be selected as a finalist in Puget Sound Business Journal’s 2010 Washington’s Best Workplaces program.

Based on employee feedback about company leadership, work/life balance, benefits offerings, and more, the award is a true indication that the spirit and vitality of Projectline’s culture has remained even as the company has grown.

“This is really a huge honor,” says Human Resources Manager Leisl Hill. “It’s my first year here at Projectline, and the amount of openness and camaraderie I’ve seen is pretty exceptional. It’s awesome to know that our team feels valued and supported.”

The Puget Sound Business Journal will announce and celebrate each of the list’s finalists at a ceremony on August 12th.

Getting a feedback loop started: 5 ways to get marketing and sales teams on the same page for better content

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Marketing Musings, Marketing Operations

Recently, we’ve been helping a client assess sales materials to figure out how they can improve relevance and quality. In talking to the product marketers and sales people, we discovered a few gaps.

Often, sales people modify materials to fit their prospects, presentation lengths, or personal styles—not to mention adjusting according to what works well and what falls flat. For marketing teams to capture what the sales people are learning and improve the materials over time, you need to build in a feedback loop.

Because everyone—not just customers, but sales people and marketers too—is getting used to interacting more directly through online networking and social media, our expectations have changed; we expect to be able to speak back, rate, and comment on things, whether they’re products, experiences, or even sales assets.

How might a product marketer enable that feedback and create the tools to capture it?

  • Assign a contact person or owner for each piece of material. Even if it’s not the perfect person, or several people should be involved, having someone “own” the material will prevent “not-my-job” and help ensure that there’s some accountability.
  • Create a central repository for the materials (many organizations already have something like this), but allow for commenting or rating of each asset. Think of how easy it is for people to “like,” “upvote,” or “downvote” something on Facebook, Reddit, or Digg – aim to create a frictionless way of communicating effectiveness.
  • Have the sales team nominate their most effective colleagues in the field, then ask those people to share the collateral that works for them. Ideally, they could also provide trainings or even example presentations, so that both product marketers and sales colleagues could see the sales assets in action.
  • Bring together some of those field champions to review content as it becomes available, using their experience to provide some initial improvements so the content can perform better right off the bat.
  • As a product marketer, don’t get too attached to your material. If you feel personally invested in the materials instead of the materials’ success, your pride can stand in the way of getting the best content for your audience. Your job is to shepherd the content to its best result, not to guard its wording.

Most of all, keep in mind that any solution needs to save time, not create more steps and tasks. Be respectful of your colleagues’ time—anything that costs them sales time won’t be sustainable beyond a few weeks.

Internal Email Newsletters: Choosing a Format to Get You Rolling

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

For many companies, email newsletters are still a vital tool for communicating internally and keeping employees looped in to company-wide news.

However, internal newsletters are often running on a tight budget. As a result, internal communications teams often design, develop, and disseminate these newsletters in-house. For an internal communicator tasked with an email newsletter project, one of the first things to consider is what kind of template will work best to make newsletter production manageable. Because there are so many options for email newsletter templates, it takes a bit of planning and foresight to choose one that fits your needs and resources.

A visually appealing template is definitely important, and employing the services of a graphic designer is money well spent if your budget allows for it. It’s easy to become hyper-focused on aesthetics (everyone likes a pretty email newsletter), but a good design isn’t the only thing to consider. To me, a template that balances beauty, functionality, and flexibility—and plays well with a wide variety of email clients—is a clear front-runner.

In my experience, people tend to lean towards using Microsoft Office Word document templates when email newsletter projects arise, because they are so familiar with Word. However, there are other options worth considering. Below are a few of the options that I have come across, including the up- and down-sides I’ve experienced with each:

Word Template HTML Template Email Marketing Solution

+ Easy to edit design, layout, and text. Can track changes through the review process. The Word template will embed images, so it can be easier to insert images within the body of the email.

- Unstable formatting; does not always render properly in different email clients.

- Embedded images can increase the size of your newsletter (you usually don’t want go over 1 MB), which can be a headache for your subscribers.

+ Allows for a wide variety of design options, limited only by your creativity and old-school HTML coding abilities.

+ The HTML template can typically be applied to your email client easily without many formatting tweaks.

- It can be difficult to make changes to the design without the help of a designer and/or web developer.

+ Customizable templates tend to offer very stable design with minimal formatting required after design is locked down. Different providers offer different levels of customization.

+ The tool manages sending the newsletter and often includes some form of reporting and tracking (e.g., open rates and click-throughs).

- There may be a per-mail or per-user cost to use the tool.

At the end of the day, it comes down to your needs, preference, and budget. You can compare a good email newsletter template to a good, practical car. Ultimately, it should do what you need it to do: get you where you’re going, or communicate across your organization. In both a template and car, I want something that’s attractive, economical, and reliable.

One recommendation before you choose: make your email newsletter accountable. Having the ability to get metrics (e.g., open rates, click through rates, etc.) is key to measuring the success of your program, and worth considering as you look for a newsletter solution. A communication ROI study by Towers Watson found that highly effective communicators are using more communication metrics (than less effective communicators) in their employee communications programs. However, 43% of participants reported that they had no formal measurements or assessments in place. The primary obstacle to using metrics was insufficient resources. This can become something of a Catch-22; if you don’t have budget, you may have trouble implementing a solution that allows for metrics, but if you don’t have metrics, you’ll face an uphill battle in demonstrating the value of your program to build a case for more resources.

There are a lot of options, but if you can update the template easily, the formatting is stable, and you have reporting and tracking capabilities, then you’re ready to roll. If you need help developing or producing effective internal communications, contact us. We’re always happy to help!

What is Social Media? More than just Twitter and Facebook

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Marketing Musings, Social Media

Today, we’re happy to share a blog post by Eric Burgess, a Social Media Strategist on the team that works with Microsoft’s Startup Business Group. This was originally posted on his blog, but offers some grounded advice about how he does great work for our clients.

Being a Social Media Strategist at Microsoft (by way of Projectline) involves much more than just tweeting and maintaining a Facebook page. It’s about building community. Our product, one in the educational sector, requires a lot of online networking. I work hard to establish and build trust with educators around the world. While you think the Microsoft name alone would give you a shoo-in to any community – it simply doesn’t.

Teachers want to know that you are just as passionate about education as you are about the product you are marketing. To show them this, when I tweet out something, I usually always sign my name at the end to help give it that personal touch. Many Social Strategists and Community Managers sign only with their initials in this fashion: ^EB. I go the extra mile and sign: -eric. On Facebook, I will send them personal emails and comments with my own profile (Eric Burgess) as well with my Mouse Mischief profile. It’s absolutely crucial in this day and age to be as reachable as you can to your customers. The old way of conducting customer service by way of 800 numbers and expensive CMS email software is on its way out. People want immediate access to you – so why not give it to them? It’s all a part of the community building I mentioned earlier. How can you build a community without making you and your product as transparent as possible? You can’t. Below are some important things to consider as you work to build up your community.

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PowerPivot paranoia: No need for fear

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Business Intelligence, Marketing Musings

During lunch at last month’s Gartner BI Summit, Microsoft presented an overview of their new PowerPivot product. As they showed its capabilities, you could see the look of concern spread across the faces of IT managers in the audience. Their furrowed eyebrows seemed to say, Great, something else that can spread like wildfire and create more information silos—just when we thought we had business users reigned in and had done away with their under-the-desk ‘shadow apps.’ Now we’ll never get one version of the truth.

But, like it or not, the meteoric rise of “self-serve” Business Intelligence tools (like Qlickview, Tableau Software, and PowerPivot) shows that these tools are not going away—and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that these new tools will actually be good for the adoption and overall growth and maturity of Business Intelligence in many organizations.

While these tools aren’t a substitute for dimensional modeling, they do serve a purpose and help to drive more investment in projects that show a greater ROI; they serve as a foundation for better collaboration between business and IT by giving the business users tools that help them access data and build their own reports. Looking at how these tools are used, allows IT to get a better understanding of what the business truly wants to measure and can make better investment decisions around data warehousing and decision support systems to serve a broader audience.

For example, let’s say I’m the manager of customer service and I decide the enterprise Business Intelligence tool I’m using doesn’t give me all of the information I’m looking for. Perhaps I’ve seen a 20% drop in customers over the last year—I need to find out why they are leaving. Using my CRM and some Pivot Tables, I can spin up some quick reports that bring in other data sources that I think might be relevant to the recent changes.

If my analysis shows a strong correlation between the loss of my customers and (for instance) a new competitor opening in my region, then I probably want to bring that data into more of a main stream environment and share it across the organization. If the drop seems primarily related to the change in economy, I probably don’t need to invest in a more tightly and costly integrated solution that brings the new data source into my centralized data warehouse. In this scenario, a few simple self-service tools could provide a rapid solution to help me understand some changes in my business (without bothering the busy folks in IT) as well as a barometer on what data/reporting needs should be brought into a more formalized reporting framework.

So there’s no need to be afraid of the more powerful self-service tools. Used correctly, they don’t take the place of data warehousing or integrated intelligence models—they simply help make informed decisions about larger Business Intelligence solutions.

If you’d like to learn more about how to establish a framework for successfully integrating these tools into your current BI environment, contact me at brianh@projectlineinc.com. We’d love to help.