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Microsoft Donation to ABV

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Tuesday tech deals: $700 Sony 13" touch-enabled ultrabook, Kindle Fire refurb $110

Tuesday tech deals: $700 Sony 13" touch-enabled ultrabook, Kindle Fire refurb $110: Sony Ivy Bridge Core i5 13" Touchscreen Ultrabook for $700 + free shipping

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Microsoft Buys CiS Solutions Provider StorSimple

Microsoft Buys CiS Solutions Provider StorSimple:
Microsoft is acquiring Cloud-integrated Storage (CiS) solutions provider StorSimple. Microsoft says the pick-up will advance its Cloud OS vision and help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing more efficiently.
“Customers faced with explosive growth in data are looking to the cloud to help them store, manage and archive that data. But, to be effective, cloud storage needs to integrate with IT’s current investments,” said Michael Park, corporate vice president, Server and Tools Division for Microsoft. “StorSimple’s approach helps customers seamlessly integrate on-premises storage with cloud storage through intelligent automation and management.”
Park spoke further about the announcement on the Windows Azure blog, where he notes, “CiS is a rapidly emerging category of storage solutions that consolidate the management of primary data, backup disaster recovery and archival data, and deliver seamless integration between on premise and cloud environments. This seamless integration and orchestration enables new levels of speed, simplicity and reliability for backup and disaster recovery (DR) while reducing costs for both primary data and data protection.”
“You may have heard us talk about the ‘Cloud OS’ over the last few months – the Cloud OS is our vision to deliver a consistent, intelligent and automated platform of compute, network and storage across a company’s datacenter, a service provider’s datacenter and the Windows Azure public cloud,” he notes. “With Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure at its core, and System Center 2012 providing automation, orchestration and management capabilities, the Cloud OS helps customers transform their data centers for the future.”
StorSimple CEO had this to say about the news: “Most StorSimple customers are mainstream IT organizations that have chosen Windows Azure as their primary cloud. We are excited to continue to work with Microsoft and bring the combined benefits of StorSimple and Windows Azure to customers around the world.”
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

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iPad Mini Event To Be Held On October 23

iPad Mini Event To Be Held On October 23:
We know almost everything there is to know about the iPad Mini. We’ve seen its design, we know that it’s coming in 12 models, and that it will launch at some point in late October or early November. Now we just need an actual date for the announcement and we’ll be set.
Well, we can finally mark that last one off the list as Apple sent out the invites for the big Apple event today. The multi-colored invitation only says, “We’ve got a little more to show you.” It’s obvious that the “little more” is the iPad Mini.

Either way, the iPad Mini is going to finally be unveiled at this event. Expect to hear every little detail about Apple’s entry into the 7-inch tablet market. We’ll also find out when we can expect to see the device on store shelves. I’m personally betting on a late October release, but an early November release is just as feasible.
It should be noted that this is Apple’s last big event for the year. The company’s shares are already riding high on the iPhone 5′s impressive performance, but they could take it even further with a great showing for the iPad Mini. A number of consumers are apparently not that excited about the device, but a great show with a lot of hype could turn that around.
Aside from the iPad Mini, Apple is expected to show off a new 13-inch retina MacBook Pro. The company will probably make some other announcements at the event, but what those other announcements are remains a mystery.
On a final note, we’ll be bringing you all the news from the October 23 event. In the meantime, you can check out all of our previous iPad Mini coverage to get an idea of what to expect come next Tuesday.
[h/t: Engadget]

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Google Makes Changes To AdSense Performance Reports

Google Makes Changes To AdSense Performance Reports:

Google announced some changes to performance reports for AdSense today. The company says the changes will improve usability and make the reports more visually compelling.

One change involves the graph area. It now covers a wider areas of the screen. Secondly, the list of metrics has been moved from the right-hand side of the screen to the top in an interactive scorecard.

There are also now new graph types, like pie graphs or bar charts. The Countries report shows where users are located on a world map, not unlike what you will find in Google Analytics.





There are new buttons for day, week and month for the timeline graph. Google says these will “allow for more control over granularity when analyzing activity over longer time periods.”

You can choose “Events” on a timeline report graph or select the “Events” report from the navigation to see how specific account changes are related to account performance, Google explains.

Reports are now organized into “Common Reports,” ” Quick Reports,” and “Saved Reports”. Quick reports can be accessed in their own panel instead of having to navigate through the Saved reports panel.

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Iranian news agency falls for Onion story, plagiarizes it | FP Passport

Iranian news agency falls for Onion story, plagiarizes it | FP Passport

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12 Automated Email Workflows You'll Kick Yourself For Not Using

12 Automated Email Workflows You'll Kick Yourself For Not Using:

Are your contacts "going with the flow," or are they just sitting dormant in your marketing database?

Well, if you don't have any email workflows set up, then your answer is probably the latter -- which also means you're missing out on some big opportunities to leverage, engage, and nurture all the people in your marketing database.

In fact, according to a report released by Lenskold Group and The Pedowitz Group, 60% of survey respondents who use marketing automation say it has increased the quality of the leads that get passed to sales. But wait ... there's more.

Lead nurturing emails aren't the only types of email workflows you can set up to get more out of your marketing database. What about the contacts who are already customers? As you can imagine, the opportunities are really quite endless. So, what types of workflow emails can you set up to make your marketing database more powerful for your business? We're going to give you quite a few suggestions in this post, but first, a note about the tools you'll need to make it all happen ...

Setting Up Email Workflows

If you hadn't already guessed, email workflows need to be set up using a marketing automation tool. This means that you'll need to refer to the specific set of instructions from your software provider to understand the capabilities and to set up the functionality of your email workflow.

For example, if you're using HubSpot's Workflows tool, you can create personalized email workflows (AKA a series of emails) that get triggered in one of three ways:

1. A contact satisfies the criteria you've set up in a Smart List, which you can set up to create dynamic segments of your contacts based on your contact properties, form submissions, email history, or analytics history.
2. A contact submits a form on your website.
3. There is no starting condition, which means that you only want to add contacts to the workflow manually. So, for instance, if you host a conference or event and want to create a workflow for the leads you drive from it, you might upload that list and add it to the workflow on its own.

In other words, you can set up email workflows based on any information you have about your contacts in your marketing database, such as things like page views, clicks, downloads, contact properties, social media clicks, or any combination of these. That's some pretty powerful stuff! And actually, this post only scratches the surface of the power of workflows. Workflows can also help you automate other actions besides email, such as setting a contact property value, updating a contact's lifecycle stage, adding or removing that contact from a list, triggering an email notification to a lead's sales rep -- all things that enable you to do more targeted, effective marketing to your individual leads. But we'll save all that for another post ;-)

Now let's dive in to some ideas for the automated email workflows you can set up to start getting more out of the power of your contacts database and your marketing automation tools. (Remember: You can make any of these email workflows even more segmented, targeted, and personalized by incorporating additional segmentation/trigger criteria. The following are some simple ideas to get the creative juices flowing.)

12 Email Workflows to Get More Out of Your Contacts Database

1) Topic Workflow(s) [Main Trigger: Content Offer Downloads]

Create a workflow for each of the industry-related topics you typically create content about. So if you're a unicorn breeder whose main content creation topics include unicorn diet, unicorn gear, and unicorn boarding, you could bucket your lead generation offers (e.g. ebooks, webinars, kits, etc.) by these topics, create a workflow for each topic, and trigger the appropriate workflow when one of your contacts downloads one of those offers. So if a contact downloaded your ebook about "10 Tips for Creating a Balanced Unicorn Diet," your "Unicorn Diet" workflow would be triggered.

2) Engaged Contacts Workflow [Main Triggers: Visits, Clicks, Form Submissions]

Set up a Smart List to pull in contacts who are really engaged with you. To create this list, use trigger criteria such as a high threshold of visits to your website, clicks on your emails, clicks on your posts in social media, and form submissions. Then create an email workflow to leverage this list as a way to encourage evangelism of your top content in social media. Because these contacts are highly engaged with you already, they're more apt to share your top content. You might also consider including a property that adds contacts with a certain threshold of Twitter followers to pull social media influencers into your list as well!

3) 'Upgrade to an Opportunity' Workflow [Main Trigger: Multiple Top-of-the-Funnel Offer Submissions]

If your leads have downloaded a lot of your top-of-the-funnel offers like ebooks and webinars, it might be a good sign they're ready for a little bit more. Set up a workflow that gets delivered to and helps to advance these leads through the sales funnel. If they were a lead, perhaps you'd send them emails to trigger behavior that might indicate they should be upgraded to an "opportunity" in your sales process. (Bonus: If you're using HubSpot's Workflows, you could set up a condition that automatically upgrades these leads to a new lifecycle stage as a result!)

4) Sales-Ready Leads Workflow [Main Trigger: MQL Conversion Events]

In the same vein, you could create a sales-ready leads workflow that helps you nurture a Smart List of contacts with the "opportunity" lifecycle stage into sales-ready leads. This workflow could include content and web pages you've identified from your conversion assists report as influential in converting leads into customers -- perhaps content like customer success stories/case studies, free trial offers, or product demos.

5) Re-Engagement Workflow [Main Trigger: Inactive Leads]

Reawaken inactive leads with a re-engagement workflow! Enter contacts into this workflow once they've met certain Smart List criteria. For example, you could set conditions such as length of time since last form submission, length of time since last website visit, etc. In your workflow, try sending leads an exclusive offer or coupon that you reserve only for this segment to get them excited about your company again. We've actually written a whole post about how to set up a re-engagement email campaign like this -- check it out.

6) Event Workflow [Main Trigger: Registration or Attendance]

Hosting a live, in-person event? Or maybe an online event, like a webinar? Use email workflows to automate your communication with your registrants leading up to the event as well as your communication post-event. For example, for event registrants, you could create a workflow that delivers important information they should know leading up to the event, such as hotel accommodations, speaker information, etc. When the event ends, you could also send a workflow to attendees that directs them to where they can access the event content online and continues to nurture them following the event.

7) Abandoned Shopping Cart Workflow [Main Trigger: Shopping Cart Abandonment]

If you're an ecommerce business, you'll likely benefit from an abandoned shopping cart workflow. The concept here is that when a customer adds an item to your online store's shopping cart but leaves the site without completing the purchase, you can trigger a workflow that reminds them of their forgotten purchase. Better yet, you could create a Smart List of people who are loyal customers and have purchased from you a certain number of times in the past; if they abandon their cart, enter them into a workflow that alerts them to the specific item in their abandoned shopping cart (thanks to the beauty of dynamic content!) and presents them with a special discount coupon reserved only for your most loyal customers.

8) New Customer Welcome/Training Workflow [Main Trigger: Lifecycle Stage]

Think about setting up a series of welcome emails when a lead converts into a paying customer, which you can trigger when a lead's lifecycle stage gets updated to "customer." Not only is this a great way to start your business' relationship with your customers on a positive note, but it also ensures that you keep your customers engaged after they buy. And if your product or service requires a little training on your customers' part, use this workflow as an opportunity to introduce helpful training materials.

9) Upsell Workflow [Triggered by Past Purchases]

As we just hinted through our last workflow suggestion, communication with your customers shouldn't stop after they make a purchase, particularly if you sell a variety of different products and services. Use workflows as an opportunity to upsell your customers or sell them complementary products and services depending on what they've already purchased. Create a Smart List of contacts who purchase a certain product -- or combination of products -- and create workflows aimed at recommending other products/services or encouraging upsells.

10) Customer Happiness Workflow [Main Trigger: High or Low NPS Scores]

If you administer regular Net Promoter surveys of your customer base, you can use customers' Net Promoter Scores as a property to trigger workflows. Simply determine what your ideal customer happiness score is, and use that as the threshold for your Smart List of happy customers. Then trigger a workflow to customers with "happy" scores and reward those customers with exclusive content or offers, and trigger a different workflow to your "unhappy" customers with content that helps to raise their scores. Bonus if you segment those unhappy customers by the reasons they're unhappy, and send them even more targeted workflows aimed at addressing those issue that are making them unhappy.

11) Customer Success/Engagement Workflow [Main Trigger: Success Metrics or Feature Usage]

If you keep track of customer success metrics, you have a prime workflow opportunity on your hands. For example, if you're trying to build up your arsenal of customer case studies, you could automatically trigger an email that asks customers if they'd be interesting in being the subject of a success story once certain customer success metrics were met. Furthermore, if you keep track of customers' feature usage in your marketing database, you could trigger a workflow for users who are only using limited features in your product/service, providing resources that educate and train them on how to use the features they're not taking advantage of.

12) Upcoming Purchase Reminder Workflow [Main Trigger: People Who Purchase on a Cycle]

Does your contacts database include customers who typically purchase on a cycle? Enter those people into a workflow that gets triggered when they make their purchase. For instance, if you sell eye care products and a customer purchases a 6-month supply of prescription contacts, you can enter that customer into a workflow that sends them an email 5 months later reminding them that their 6-month supply is about to run out, and it might be time to order a new batch of contacts.

What other email workflow ideas would you add to this list?

Image Credit: Sale Family Memories

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The RIGHT Way to Weave Product Mentions Into Your Marketing

The RIGHT Way to Weave Product Mentions Into Your Marketing:



Everyone wants to market their product like Apple. No surprise there.

But last week, Salesforce.com celebrated the 10th year of it's annual user conference, Dreamforce. And you know what? We learned a thing or two about product marketing there, too. (And lots of other things, of course -- grab our top 10 takeaways here in case you missed the conference. It'll catch you up in a jiffy so you sound smart at the watercooler.)

So, what was so cool about the product marketing learnings? It was that it addressed a common refrain we hear from customers all the time -- how can I incorporate mentions of my product and still be an inbound marketer? I mean, I don't want to shove it in my leads' faces, you know?

Makes sense. We've often advised companies to stop talking about their products and focus on offering helpful content instead. However, product marketing is not inherently bad, nor should it be removed entirely from the inbound marketing process. In fact, it's crucial to make sure you're successfully educating the market on what value your business has to offer -- in other words, how you help solve their problems. The key to doing it in an "inbound" way is figuring out how to display the value your product has to your leads. And this post is going to show you exactly how to do that!

Ready to learn how to inject product mentions into your inbound marketing with all the finesse of an Apple product marketer? Me too. Let's get started!

Position your product in your leads' terms.

So your product's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Okay, whatever, anyone can say that. Why? What does it do for me?

With inbound marketing, it's not about you. It's about your leads. That means you talk about your product in a way that resonates with your leads. How do you do that? A couple ways. First, get to know your buyer personas. If you don't know who your buyer persona is yet, reference this blog post that tells you exactly how to research and compile your buyer personas.

Once you know more about who your target audience is, you can write in the proper tone, and more important, describe your product in terms of how it will help your customers. What problems will your product solve? How will your product make a prospective customer's life easier? Don't get locked up in talking about your product's amazing, shiny, and glittery features. Content like that will start sounding self-serving, and that's a turn off. Not to mention totally uninteresting.

Use your product to help explain concepts in blog content.

But wait ... isn't your blog content was supposed to be educational, not promotional? Well yes, it should be. But that doesn't mean your product can't help you explain concepts! Let's use an example from a recent blog post to help demonstrate the fine line here. Take a look at this excerpt from our blog post, "A Marketer's Guide to Nailing the Timing and Frequency of Social Media Updates."







This excerpt explains how to figure out the right day and time to publish your social media updates based on number of clicks. And to be thorough, it helps to actually show readers how to do that, right? Well, the author couldn't possibly cover how to do that in every single social media publishing tool out there on the marketing. That would be insane. So instead, she says, "Sort them by number of clicks in whatever social media publishing tool you use." Then, she notes one possible tool is HubSpot's, and if you use it, this is how that step would work. The concept is demonstrated, and it's done through our social media tool. See how non-invasive that product mention was?

Include product calls-to-action in your lead generation offers.

If you have at any point during your time engaging with HubSpot downloaded and read one of our ebooks, you've most likely seen this tip in action. We have a short one-pager in all our ebooks to teach people about our all-in-one marketing software if they're curious to learn, as well as an opportunity to grab a demo. To do this in an "inboundy" way, ensure your CTA related back to the content of the lead generation offer. For example, our email ebooks will include highlights of our email marketing tools throughout -- much like the blog content includes contextual, educational references to our software when appropriate. And when it comes to the CTA, we edit the copy to reflect how our software helps solve email marketing problems ... because that's the subject of the ebook!

Some folks will be interested. Some won't. Just like any other CTA. No biggie!

Promote product content based on funnel stage.

Timing is everything. It doesn't upset people to learn a lot about your product ... when they want to hear a lot about your product. This, however, requires a good understanding of your company's marketing and sales funnel. If you can figure out what stage of the funnel your leads are in based on their behaviors, however, then you'll be able to map out the content you expose them to! It should look something like this:



See that blue circle in the middle? When they fall into that part of the buying cycle, it's not "non-inboundy" to expose product content to your leads. They're ready to start research actual solutions to their problem, and that includes your product!

Our latest software release is helping make this easier for marketers, too, with the use of dynamic, or "smart," CTAs. The tool lets marketers set different CTA options to appear based on where the person viewing the CTA exists in your funnel. For example, someone in that orange circle above that visits, say, your blog would see a more educational, content-focused CTA. A repeat visitor that's downloaded tons of your content and viewed your case study page, however, would automatically get exposed to a free trial CTA. This type of targeting helps your product content appear to the right people at the right time.

Talk about your product through customer success stories.

Showcase your product's value through your customers' successes. Moving stories are powerful selling tools, because they communicate your product's value through a real-life scenario. It's more relatable. People get it. They see how your product could fit into their life.

Salesforce.com played some really compelling success stories throughout the keynote presentations, and this was -- in my opinion -- the most memorable content from the conference. People remember faces, stories, real challenges, and solutions. Think about what stories you can offer your leads that would get them excited about one day being a success story with you.

Help existing customers get more value out of your product.

Yes, it's great for your business when you get more revenue from your existing customers. But it's also good for those customers you're upselling ... if they can truly benefit from the upsell. Approach marketing to your current customers as a way to expose them to features of your product that might make them more successful. If you're being transparent and helpful -- entering them into a email workflow that educates them on an add-on that could help them be more of a power user, for instance -- it isn't obnoxious and overly salesey. It's a really good tip, and you're a good business for giving it.

Make your product content easy to find when people are looking for it.

This tip, friends, is honestly the one HubSpot through the years has struggled with the most. (Sorry, prospective customers!) Make your product content easily available and obvious to those who want it. The worst thing you can do is make it challenging for someone who is investigating your product to find helpful information on the value and features of your product. So this pointer is a good reminder to our content-focused brethren -- ourselves included. Content is key to inbound marketing, so treat your product-focused content with equal pride and don't keep it hidden so nobody can learn more about how awesome you are. Because you are, indeed, totally awesome :-)

What do you think? How have you made your product content inbound-y?

Image credit: kyz

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