CopyDiva

In my current incarnation as La Presidente of the Colorado Business Marketing Association, I am leading up the role of a total scrap/re-do of our association website, which has served us well over the past 7 years or so, but has not kept pace with technology advances. No small task for a group that is volunteer led (while expertly managed by our Executive Director). With my able committee members, we just recently reviewed all the proposals sent to us in response to our very detailed RFP.

We spent more than a month on the RFP, because we have very specific needs for the site, as well as goals that we want to achieve with the site. We want the site to last quite a while, so we need it to be flexible, easily updated, database driven - basically, not be difficult for a volunteer organization to manage, update and yank data from. So, the requirements we put together were extensive.

With that in mind, I thought that the responses would be similar in terms of addressing each of the stated needs and goals. This was not necessarily the case. We did come up with three that did meet that standard, and these are the companies we are interviewing. But, many of these RFP’s were just littered with extraneous crap that I did not want to read, including:

• All the services the firm offers that I didn’t ask for: This was an RFP after all, not an agency review.
• Unrelated boilerplate services: The purpose of a boilerplate is to have a constant resource for consistency in presentation. That’s great, but please, if my RFP doesn’t ask about SEM, don’t give me 3 paragraphs on your philosophy plus the bio of your SM expert. It just makes your presentation longer and less helpful.
• “What you SHOULD do…”: A few of the proposals spent pages explaining that we need to make sure of X when we are building a site for SEO (as an example). Please don’t preach, just give me what I asked for!
• Management of un-asked for services: Please don’t tell me your copywriting process when, specifically in the RFP, it said that we would provide 100% of the copy.
• Spend lots of time on a minor piece of the RFP: Our RFP had very limited design needs - we are working within design standards, and are looking for a very basic, clean design that we are going to lead. This was made clear in the RFP, yet a number of the responses provided long narratives about design, images/photos. It made us feel that these firms didn’t read the RFP carefully.

The companies we ended up picking to interview directly addressed each of the major points of the RFP and didn’t focus time on things it was clear we didn’t care about.

Remember, an RFP is different than an agency review. RFP responses should:

• directly address each requirement
• limit the self-promotion
• steer clear of add-on services

There were a few really high value presenters at last week’s BMA Conference in Las Vegas. Mike Metz from Cisco was one of them.

Metz started out discussing that people are obsessing about web 2.0, but that 3.0 technologies — mobile access, viral video, etc. — are on the rise. Things are changing so fast.

Cisco is getting the message loud and clear that now customers are in control, and push marketing isn’t working well for them. For example, their email response rates are going down. So, Cisco is looking for ways to generate leads, connect with site visitors, and just generally make the entire online Cisco experience more positive. The goal, he said, is to drive more qualified leads, especially in the newer markets they serve in SMB, where an enterprise sales force isn’t feasible.

Cisco is trying to move their web site from rigid and technically driven to become intelligent, personalized, and are looking for new ways to get people through the conversion process that demonstrate innovation.

Some of the ways they are approaching this goal:

Customer forums: Now, Cisco product managers can watch and participate in conversations with customers.

Embedded video: They have incorporated low-end video on their site as a test. The results are that visitors who view these videos stay on the site longer, view more content and return more often. They are more committed.

Product reviews by customers: pretty brave, to offer that, I think. Can you imagine if Microsoft did that?

Mobile web: Cisco launched a mobile web site and have seen visitors grow from 10K to 75K in 3 months. More people watched the embedded video on the mobile web site than any of the videos on their regular site combined, but they don’t necessarily know why – could it be because access to smart phones is greater than to computers (globally)?

Click to chat: Started this as a pilot on 15 low traffic pages. Chat metrics: 43% who opened chat sessions were converted to A leads, a pretty impressive stat. The conclusion is that anyone willing to engage in a real live session is a little further along in the sales process. To pick their pages where to incorporate click to chat, they are doing usability testing to see where it will be the least intrusive.

Virtual: They did their last analyst briefing on Second Life and had a very high satisfaction rate, even though their VP who did it said it was odd to present to horses, unicorns and other weird creatures.

I was pretty impressed with the level of risk being taken by Cisco to try out these new technologies even though there isn’t any ROI basis. And, they are willing to admit they don’t know why some things are successful, or what the residual gain is with customers.

I’m currently in Las Vegas for the annual BMA National Conference. Today was Chapter Leadership Day, which as an active board member (ok, I am this year’s president) of the Colorado Chapter, I find really valuable. It’s an afternoon of sessions dedicated to sharing knowledge amongst different chapters on everything to developing compelling programs to retaining members and creating new member benefits. Many chapters are doing innovative things to build and retain membership, even though this is a time when trade organizations as a whole are struggling to hold on to existing members — and are in fact struggling to survive.

Its always fun to get to see my fellow chapter leaders and find out what they are doing on the local level. Organizationally, this is a group that’s good at sharing knowledge so that other chapters can achieve success, a good feeling to be a part of this in such a competitive business world.
I’m impressed to see the positive changes taking hold in the national organization, which has experienced some stellar lows in leadership and financial management in the past. The current national board has done quite a job turning around the organization to the point of actually being able to support chapters (instead of the other way around). Kudos go to the leadership over the past few years for having the vision to get beyond these problems and move the BMA towards its true mission of helping business marketers be successful in their work.

Now if only Vegas wasn’t so overstimulating, I might actually be able to go to sleep…