Printers!  Have you thought about adding interactive QR Codes to your printed pieces?  If you are, then are your QR Codes leading to mobilized content?  By this I mean content that provides your audience with a pleasant experience of mobile accessible, easy-to-read content with photos, links and more.  If not, you should consider using a Mobile Content Management System.  These specific types of systems allow you to generate content that is made to be used on a mobile device:  from your website, to your personalized ID card, coupons, ads, and blogs.  The mobile user expects a mobile experience.  If you’re driving folks to a regular web page or a coupon that was made for a regular web page, it’s probably too big to use or view. So don’t blame the QR code – blame the (non-mobile) content.

If you want to use QR Codes on your printed pieces for a marketing campaign, or even customer service applications, think about how your landing pages may look on a mobile phone. Have you ever encountered a landing page that is too big so that you have to scroll around to see the page? What a pain.  That is a big fail in my mind.  Most people won’t put up with it, and will leave before getting through the whole page.   A too-big Personalized Landing Page (PLP) that gets displayed on a mobile phone?  Fail – The mobile user will leave faster than they clicked on it. You went to the trouble of creating a PLP, so why not make it compatible for viewing on a mobile platform?

Also, when you drive folks to non-mobilized content, you can’t take advantage of the capabilities smart phones have inherently built into them, like texting from the page you are on, or sharing the content instantly.   Think about those missed opportunities the next time you create a direct mail or printed marketing campaign.

Mobile Marketing is here and is expanding hard and fast.  If you want to engage with your mobile audience the right way, you must mobilize your content.  If you are producing marketing materials that direct people to a web page, and there is even a chance that your audience will be viewing them on a mobile device (and trust me, they will be), you need to make sure that your content is optimized for the mobile web.

So how do you do that? Here are some tips:

• Provide minimal and very clear navigation at the top of the page, and make sure navigation is consistent throughout the site.
• Try not to use sidebar navigation, and make sure that font size is large enough to be legible on a small screen.
• Don’t use more links unless they are absolutely necessary. You need to take into account the trade-off between having too many links on a page and asking the user to follow too many links to find the content they are looking for.
• Use clear and simple language. Save long descriptions and blocks of text for secondary web pages, don’t put them on your home page.
• Try to limit scrolling to one direction if at all possible.
• Make sure you test your content on different mobile platforms so you know that it will work when viewed on an iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or other operating system.
• NEVER use popups. Nobody likes them on regular websites, and they are even worse on a mobile device, IF your visitor can even see them.
• Make sure your site will load quickly, and works well with the memory limitations of a mobile device.

If you take the time to customize your content for mobile devices, you will get a better customer response from your campaign, and customers will be more likely to come back to your site. Mobile is the direction the web is headed – get there now!

“Right message, right time, right medium” is the mantra that we’ve been hearing regarding the need to make communications more relevant, personalized, and tailored to a person’s interests and preferences. One area where we’ve seen increased focus on applying this concept is in the area of customer communications, which encompasses informational, transactional, and promotional communications that are sent from an organization to its customers across a variety of mediums. More and more, those three applications of customer communication are converging, all while organizations are striving to deliver better overall customer experiences across every touchpoint with those customers.

While working to achieve higher relevance  with customer communications can have effective results, aligning both business strategy and technology continues to be challenging. Walls need to be broken down between key departments like IT, marketing, public relations, and customer service to have uniform understanding of goals with customer communication, as well as to open up information sharing. At the same time, technology also needs to be aligned, integrated, and leveraged to meet customer communications goals, and needs to be user-friendly enough for business users to easily utilize it. Aligning the right business units with each other can ensure the right technologies are used for the right application and valuable information is driving those applications.

The customer communications technology landscape itself continues to evolve as companies continue to strive for better ways to execute on their communications strategies. Overall customer experience and engagement has become one of the pillars of the business technology IT stack, and communications is a big part of that. From call center management to CRM tools and content management systems, technology is being aligned to deliver consistent, relevant, and ultimately satisfying customer experiences.

This technology stack also includes tools that enable increasingly multi-channel output, including print, e-mail, text messages, and even Web presentation. We would traditionally categorize these tools as “document composition,” although over the past five years, many of these systems have greatly expanded in scope to manage and output communications across a variety of channels. In addition, as large, enterprise IT vendors have continued to help transform customer communications for their clients, they’ve needed to leverage document composition technology to manage the “last mile” of communications output to the customer.

Because of this need, we’ve seen a spate of acquisitions of document composition technology providers by enterprise-scale vendors:

• 2004: Pitney Bowes acquires Group1 Software
  
• 2008: EMC acquires Document Sciences
• 2008: Oracle acquires Skywire Software
• 2008: HP acquires Exstream Software
• 2009: FIS acquires Metavante
• 2010: OpenText acquires StreamServe

In general, these acquisitions serve as a way to support broader objectives of enabling businesses to execute customer communications in a more seamless way. Even those vendors that remain independent maintain partnerships with large-scale vendors and have worked to ensure that their technology can integrate with a wide variety of third-party systems.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that no single technology is going to be able to enable communications that achieve the concept of “right person, right time, right medium”. Enterprise IT vendors have realized this, and have grabbed many key output technology players to integrate that component with other systems in a modular way. Businesses need to be thinking the same way: leverage the right technology where appropriate and make sure it aligns with an overarching customer communications strategy. Achieving relevance and value through delivering a great end-to-end customer experience is more attainable than ever, but it requires goal-driven business and technology alignment to realize.

While he was tramping around Peru, Peter O’Neill, a web analyst from Australia, dreamed up a blog about achieving excellence in “joined-up” marketing.

Peter concludes that the marketing management tools and web analytics that measure revenue at various online touchpoints don’t reflect the contribution of offline activities like friends’ recommendations, using multiple computers when ordering, in-store purchasing, and so on. Add in such other influences as PR, print advertising, and social media and – clearly – “What drove the sale?” becomes an inscrutable question. At least for now. But maybe not for long.

Undaunted, Peter says “The measure of success of a marketing campaign is quite simply whether the incremental profit generated was greater than the incremental marketing spend (including salary costs for people working on the campaigns) during the defined time period.”

That makes some sense, but it really doesn’t work for direct marketers who have followed Lester Wunderman since 1967, testing, measuring, adjusting, testing, measuring… and so on.

Though they didn’t admit it for years, all this weighing must have made quite an impression on TV, radio, newspaper, billboard, and print advertising folks, because — somewhere on the way to the scales — a strange thing happened. Every channel began to quietly calculate how it, too, could measure.

As extensions of traditional direct marketing, email, p-URLs, landing pages, and all other online media were naturals of course. But the guys with the scales also began to find measurable profits in infomercials, radio, publishing, television, mobile marketing, and even social media.

In fact, even though apologists had let PR and media advertising off the ROI hook for years, the first arrows shot at social media’s launch charged that nobody could measure its results.

So, is it possible to calculate ROI across multiple channels? It is. Increasingly, it is because direct marketing suggests we can.

p.s. The notion that direct mail is the only measurable non-electronic marketing media still makes it stand out in the crowd.

The environmental impacts of forestry and pulp and paper operations have been extensively investigated, reported and in certain cases exaggerated and dramatized for maximum impact, including images of clear-cut areas of forest, mill sites emitting wastewater and air emissions.  But, there is a positive side to communicate as well. Over the last three decades, the pulp and paper industry has come a long way in terms of environmental and social responsibility. In Europe and North America forestry practices and pulp and paper mill environmental performance have improved dramatically. Emissions to air, water and landfills are now a fraction of what they were 30 years ago. These positive changes have been due in part to more strict environmental regulations and major investments by leaders in the industry such as modern mills using best-available-technology (B-A-T) .

However, environmental performance is dependent on individual companies and the regions where operations are located. The strictest level of environmental enforcement is typically seen in developed nations and the least strict in developing nations. The same goes for use of B-A-T. For example, large multi-national companies may have relatively modern mill operations throughout the world whereas small or medium sized pulp and paper producers based in developing countries may still be running old technology and be faced with less regulation. One thing is clear: there has been a more significant focus on the sustainability of paper products in recent years. More paper buyers are now evaluating the environmental and social responsibility of their paper suppliers to minimize risks and develop business relationships with producers who are engaged in sustainability.

Below are some basic tips that help define “sustainable paper” based on procurement policies I have had the opportunity to review and key guidance documents such as the WBCSD / WRI Guide on Sustainable Procurement of Wood and Paper-based Products.

 1. Reduce impacts over the life cycle of paper.  

Paper has environmental impacts at all stages of its life cycle: raw material procurement including forest management, manufacturing of pulp and paper, paper distribution, transportation, recovery and disposal. The goal of sustainable production should be to lower the environmental impact, or the overall environmental footprint, of paper products over their life cycle. Reporting tools such as EPAT , Paper Profile , and the WWF Paper Scorecard  assess product performance across a wide range of indicators such as percentage of certified fibre from sustainable managed forests, recycled fibre use, water and energy use, emissions to air and water, solid waste to landfill, greenhouse gas emissions, social responsibility, certifications and reporting.

 2. Show regulatory compliance.

Most people expect companies to be in full compliance with environmental regulations. When problems happen, pulp and paper producers should show how they reacted and how they will prevent re-occurrence. Openness and transparency maintains credibility and good business relationships.

3. Promote sustainable forest management and biodiversity.

One way to prove sustainable forest management is for pulp and paper producers to certify forest land and their fiber tracing system using standards such as PEFC , SFI, and FSC . Additional initiatives can include the implementation of a biodiversity strategy or having policies against forest conversion and old-growth forest protection, to name a few. When paper products are labelled with the PEFC, SFI or FSC logos it is a sign of responsible forest management.

4. Recycle and use recycled fiber sustainably.

Recycling paper is very good practice, but sustainable use of recycled fibre means using it at the right locations and in the right paper grades based on economic and environmental considerations. In general, it makes more sense to use recycled fiber in lower end grades such as cartonboard and paperboard products (ex: packaging) than in graphic papers like magazine and catalog grades. Today, over 80% of recovered paper globally is used in packaging grades because the manufacture of these grades does not typically involve de-inking and / or bleaching (i.e. less cost and environmental impacts). Newsprint and tissue paper is also a large user of recycled fiber.

Other factors to consider are transportation distance of the recovered paper (i.e. usually near areas of large population density) and paper quality needs. In many cases, wood fiber may be a more sustainable choice providing a better balance between economic and environmental considerations. In the papermaking process, wood fiber can be recycled an estimated 4 to 7 times, after which the fiber breaks down and becomes waste. In other words, recovered paper is not an infinite source of raw material. To make the global fiber cycle work, a continual input of 35 to 65% of fresh wood fiber is needed depending on the grade of paper manufactured. If no wood fibre were used then degradation through recycling would result in the world running out of paper in within a period 6 to 18 months depending on the paper grade. Visit PaperLifecycle.org to read more on this topic.

Whether you purchase wood based or recycled paper, engagement in recycling of all paper products should be part of your life and your business. Stay tuned for “Part 2″ next week where I present the remaining tips on identifying sustainable paper.

Phil Riebel is a senior sustainability advisor to the forest, paper and print sector. He has 23 years of international experience in the sector including senior management positions in industry and consulting. Phil also owns and manages 200 acres of sustainable forest. He can be reached at philriebel@bellaliant.net

I received a press release from Pitch PR touting a Chicago-area company that’s got “a new way for business to market their services electronically/paper-free.”

For $199 a year, Pitch says a business can go green, go mobile, and “stay in touch.” It can create “electronic brochures, flyers, messages, schedules, electronic business cards, and more.”

I checked it out. The enterprise is “a property of” a real estate investment company which specializes in lease-to-own real estate and also appears to be affiliated with a now-defunct appraisal company.

In 2011, promises will be coming out of the woodwork to “help” businesses get green, mobile, and marketed. For serious marketers, this can only underscore the value of experience.

For one thing, eco-conscious direct marketers are already stomping the carbon footprint. Meanwhile, “paperless” is by no means a sure sell. Both consumers and the government are increasingly suspicious of “greenwashers,” so the pros are keeping it real.

Mobile marketing remains tricky. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse says smart phone users are leery of marketing outreach to their devices and lawsuits are on the rise.

And then there’s direct mail. According to The DMA and other industry observers, in 2010 direct mail advanced as a trusted marketing medium.

That’s why, for now and in the foreseeable future, direct mail — along with all other serious opt-in direct marketing — will be the best channel standing.

By leveraging current technology, marketers can use print as a way to create a dialogue in B2C communications. Send an email, then a targeted print piece with a PURL, a microsite or QR code to increase points of contact and gather more information about the customer’s interests. In doing this, they’re saying goodbye to the old-school “spray and pray” direct mail methodology and choosing to spend more on the piece to ensure its visibility and return on investment. So what does folding have to do with it? Successful direct mail involves the alignment of several variables, and choice of folding style is one of these variables, however so is color palette, text and imagery, paper choice, layout, format and even schedule. Below is a list of questions addressing machinability for direct mail. I’ll be posting in the future about envelope choice, tips, tricks and techniques to help you get the most out of your DM investment.

Is one fold better than another at getting the most into a standard letter envelope?

Not really. There are always different configurations for folding paper that can get a very large amount of information into a compact size. When designing for folded materials, what is most important is to focus on the organization and reveal of the content so that it does not confuse the recipient, and the placement of critical marketing messages. I always suggest that you mock up your layout and hand it to a few people to make sure the message is properly communicated. If your small test group doesn’t get it, your mailing audience won’t get it, either, and you should rework your layout and test again.

What are the most effective machinable folds for direct mail?

The key to successful machine production for direct mail is closed edges. Perfect example – the accordion fold is notoriously problematic for both self-mailing and for auto-inserting. The trouble is caused by the format—accordions don’t have a closed edge. The open sides make it very difficult, if not impossible, to auto insert, and if it’s self-mailing it’ll need four tabs to seal both sides. Expensive and unattractive. However, if you choose a wrapped accordion (see illustration), you get the accordion experience you’re looking for with its pull-out panels, but you also get a closed edge, which changes the tab requirement and offers a closed edge for inserting. So, sometimes you can get what you want with a little creativity.

How important is machinability for direct mail?

I’ll answer a question with a question: How important is it that you don’t throw money away? I see it all the time—a really great design built in a format that instantly adds a .20 per piece non-machinable surcharge to the mailing budget. Why???? I have samples in my collection that miss USPS aspect ratio by 1/8 inch. It’s silly. What a mindless and costly mistake. In my opinion, there are two things to consider when talking about machine production—machinability of the fold and machinability for mailing. Unless you don’t care at all about the budget, ideally, you should aim for a maximum of one of the two options, but never both. For example, if you’re printing a fairly short run, you may choose a unique folding style that has to be hand folded, but you should try to produce it in a format that is within USPS aspect ratio. Or, similar scenario, design a machinable fold in a square format if you must, however, your most efficient solution will always be machinable fold in a machinable mail format.

Editors Note:  You can find more ideas from Trish at the foldfactory 3-D sample library and watch short videos of hundreds of folding ideas that will be sure to add some variety to the everyday. 

Paper making has changed over the past decades. The industry uses renewable energy more that ever, it has reduced water usage and has increased the use of recovered fiber; forest certification and chain of custody now insure the end user that the right things are being done, really!

But it also has been keeping up with the advancing technologies in printing and imaging today. With today’s digital presses paper makers need to work hand in hand and enhance the sheet to work and be qualified on the many machines out there in the market place. Paper like any product has many different variables that go into the making of a sheet.

Because toner and inkjet behave differently than ink, they usually require special papers. Some paper manufacturers offer grades for both digital and offset litho, so that jobs can include sheets printed by both processes. Take Inkjet for example. Inkjet printing is was originally designed mainly for home, home office, and small business use, but is becoming increasingly common for commercial applications. For best results on inkjet printers, use papers specifically designed for digital inkjet technology—with optimized smoothness, sizing, sheet formation, special coating, or enhanced brightness. Inks for drop-on-demand inkjet printing are pigment-based rather than dye-based. This means they are water-soluble and therefore less permanent than inks used in offset printing or toners used in laser printing (electrophotography). Non-water-soluble, lightfast inks are now available for industrial use. Combined with fade-resistant papers, they enhance photo longevity and color fastness. Some printers feature a custom color match (Pantone Matching System – PMS) for high-resolution jobs. Printers can also provide a color chart to designers. 

For Digital laser methods; Static electricity is how toner-based printers work, so humidity control is important. Some digital presses have built-in temperature and humidity control systems, but except for a few models, you will need a humidity-controlled environment. Higher temperatures increase the likelihood of humidity-related problems, including curling, blistering, cracking, etc. The higher the speed, the more heat generated. Proper paper conditioning prior to and during printing are important. Ideal conditions are 45% humidity and 75ºF (24ºC).

Specifically designed digital laser printing papers provide the best performance. Better “runnability” and end results are obtained with ultra-smooth surfaces and high brightness. Because the color range is limited compared to offset printing, laser digital printing is not recommended for color-crucial jobs (i.e. paint or fabric swatches).

Choosing the right media and then the right printing technology pared with the right paper can be tricky but a good printer and paper supplier can help. Trust them to help you get your message across!

Has anyone else been confused when trying to find the On Demand Conference? I have been a regular attendee for years and received the call for conference papers last year. When I hit the link to “Conference Info” and “Register for the Program” on the web site and ended up at Publishing Xchange I was sure I must have done something wrong. I went back to the home page and saw the separate information at the bottom of the page on Publishing Xchange and that it was now co-located with On Demand and Info 360. So I scrolled back up to the On Demand section and clicked on the highlighted phrase in the text, “new conference program”. I again ended up at the Publishing Xchange web page. After clicking around the site for awhile, FINALLY I found a link that said “Attend the Print-Centric Sessions Produced by WhatTheyThink”, and clicked through to . . . the Publishing Xchange Conference-At-A-Glance page.

The emphasis on publishing was not what I expected from On Demand; cross media communication, yes, but publishing? The Corporate sponsorship of the different tracks was also a surprise. In past On Demand conferences, the sessions provided opportunities to understand how technology, suppliers, and customers came together to solve Business Communication issues. I wondered what drove this to change from what seemed to be a very useful and well attended format. There was no communication beforehand that the title, format, just about everything had changed. Where do I go now to get information on postal issues like IMB, and on fulfillment or distribution or the many other business communications topics that On Demand was known for?

Finally after looking a couple more times and reading more of the marketing materials I concluded this was the only conference at the ON DEMAND Expo this year. Based on my positive past experience and a bit of curiosity I decided to go ahead and register for the Publishing Xchange Conference. We will have to wait until March to see if that was a smart thing to do. I am still struggling however with how Business Communications (Direct Marketing and Critical Customer Documents) are Publishing. It appears that service providers, suppliers and clients representing a broad spectrum of offerings are being driven together under Publishing, Why?

Have you seen the television show “V”, where lizard aliens look human until they are wounded and you can see the lizard underneath? It appears On Demand has suffered a similar fate. Someone put an On Demand shell over a publishing conference. What’s the message here? When they talk about business transformation and industry restructuring on the On Demand home page, do they mean all of us in Direct Marketing and Critical Customer Communications should throw in the towel and try Publishing? Is it “invasion of the conference snatchers?” Or maybe it’s a Borg plot and “resistance is futile.”

Have aliens taken over ON DEMAND? Should I be afraid?

Who knew it would ever be possible to share a plethora of informational content, upload photos, alert every Facebook and Twitter friend where you are and tweet about what is on your mind- all within seconds just by using a phone? Today, technology is excelling at pushing the possibilities of what smart phones can do in terms of how people communicate, promote events and places, and share whatever it is they want to post to the world. Because of all of these amazing abilities a cell phone now has, not becoming a user of social media would be foolish.

Social media on a phone has become such a convenience that now it will no longer take up time to skim through your newsfeed at work, post pictures you have taken days ago or other time-consuming tasks. A smart phone now makes it possible to be interactive with your fans simply by pressing a few buttons whenever you have a few seconds to spare. When you are at an event, you can check-in to FourSquare, along with adding tips about your location and to see who else has checked in there that day. This will also simultaneously promote that event because now anyone who is following you will see you are attending and it may spike interest for them to attend. If we continue with this example of attending an event, you can also take photos and video using your smart phone’s camera. Smart phones make it possible to immediately post this content to anything, such as E-mail, text-messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr- you name it! You can then add a description of the picture or video you posted. This will allow you to feature live content from anywhere you are, which makes the amount of promotional possibilities skyrocket.

We all know that a big reason for people gathering at business events is to network. Social media takes networking one step further by allowing you to interact with new contacts on a casual day-to-day basis after meeting them. This is made possible by sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Don’t exchange business cards that may get lost, discarded or added to a mile-long Excel spreadsheet of contacts. Instead, digitally connect with the people you meet through social media using your phone. It is a fresh, interactive way of staying in touch. Being able to ask, “Are you on Facebook or LinkedIn?” and then friend them using your smart phone makes networking easy and fun. Connecting with contacts through social media will allow you to exchange information in the future, see who their contacts are, gain a better knowledge of their work experience, learn what future events they are going to and more.

Cell phones are no longer just for calling and texting.  They now offer the ability for people to share their experiences with others through photos, videos, announcements, links and more. Smart phones are helping people become more connected in incredible ways, and this is just the beginning. If you have a smart phone but are still hesitant about stepping into the world of social media, jump in now. It is easy to learn and use and you would be blown away with what your smart phone is capable of doing!

Editors Note: Heidi Tolliver-Nigro posted on February 6 about SmartPhones and Phonebooks and the generational gap. John’s post is a timely reminder that we need to become users of the channel so that we can better understand how to support the channel for our customers.

Sometimes you need to fire your client. God, that’s a hard one for me.

After 16 years at the helm of my own company and over 700 clients, I’ve only given a client the pink slip four times (and once it was simply for their sake because they were really too busy and successful to use what my company was doing for them.) However, in terms of long-term branding and business reputation, it is a road that must be taken occasionally.

It was real hard to let a client go in the wake of 2008. With fear, uncertainty, and outright panic widespread it was particularly painful to give any client the heave-ho. But even in the worst of times there is a point of demarcation that must not be crossed.

In my case that line of demarcation is first and foremost discourtesy to or abuse of my staff. My employees and associates are ultimately my first priority. They are more important to me than my clients. This is certainly counter intuitive for many of my small business colleagues. For example, The Guardian Life Index: What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners recently reported that customers are priority numero uno for the vast majority of entrepreneurs.This is certainly understandable given the cost and time commitment that goes into generating new business. However, my feeling is that I can get new clients, but maintaining an ethical, culturally consistent employee base is ultimately more important to the long-term health of my company. In fact, the customer is not “always right” when a basic incongruity emerges in corporate culture between your client and your company. Then it is better to gently disengage.

Crain’s New York reported  that CEO Kevin Labick of digital consulting firm Empathy Lab recently fired a huge retail client. He recounts a litany of offenses that ranged from treating staff disrespectfully to late payments to nickel-and-diming small matters clearly stipulated in the contract. Such a nuisance is a time waster and a distraction from long-term goals and the branded reputability of any small firm. Also,  you may be judged by your client’s values and reputation, as much as your own.

Ecclesiastica  in the Apocrypha states, “Have regard for your name, since it will remain for you longer than a great store of gold.”

Thank you, Ecclesiasticus.

Editors Note: The Digital Nirvana is very pleased to welcome Tim Askew to our team of bloggers. Tim is the founder of Corporate Rain International and a renowned expert on sales, sales management and entrepreneurship. Thank you Tim!

In this economy and with all the pressures, are your key suppliers delivering the performance you expect?  Have you run into any of these issues:

• Inconsistent quality throughout a production run or from shipment to shipment?
• Product not packaged or labeled as specified?
• Quantities are short or there are excessive overruns?
• Late deliveries?

 The impacts to your company are bad enough, affecting your costs due to rework, inspection, or slowdown in production, but the real and lasting impact is failure to meet your customer’s delivery or quality expectations. You may also be paying too much for materials, which of course comprise a very large percentage of the total cost of print or mailings. Do you know if your costs are competitive?  If not, it contributes to loss of sales opportunities for you.

These are just a few of the purchasing and supplier challenges facing organizations today.  What can you do about it? Do you change suppliers?  Add extra inspection to your process?  Changing suppliers frequently or taking other actions internally are costly solutions.  A more effective solution is to implement a rigorous supplier scorecard process.  This provides a mechanism for objective two-way communication that can strengthen mutually beneficial relationships, and make both companies better.   

Implementing a Supplier Scorecard

The basics of setting up a scorecard are relatively simple – decide what you want to measure, and the relative importance of each factor.  Review any current issues and performance problems, as well as customer-identified quality expectations, and these become your measurement factors. Take the time to think about what happens to your organization if the standard is not met.  Then establish a simple ranking of 1 to 5 on worst to best. 

Once the scorecard development is complete, communication and training come next.  Communicate the goals for the supplier scorecard both internally and to your suppliers well in advance of the first evaluation.  The communication with suppliers may clarify or establish clearer expectations than existed before.  It should also open the door to regular feedback from the supplier on what you and your company may do differently to enable them to more effectively meet your requirements. Scorecards should be reviewed quarterly or at minimum twice per year or you won’t get a balanced picture or have opportunities to make course corrections.

Top-level reinforcement of the importance of fair, accurate, detailed, and timely input to the scorecard is critical.  It must be clear that the scorecard does not, of course, replace the need for timely resolution of any specific issue with a supplier, but it provides visibility into overall performance and trends that need to be reinforced, or corrective action initiated.

In addition, if you are penalized for failing to meet standards with your clients, any suppliers who contributed to that failure should also be held financially accountable. However, penalties are not the goal, they are just more enforceable with clear communication and measurement. The benefits to this best practice will be trusted suppliers you can count on to make your business run optimally, providing you with pricing and quality that make your end product better which in turn gives you an advantage over the competition.  Just firing poor suppliers who don’t “make the grade” makes it more difficult and costly for you to make the grade with your clients. Knowing who you can count on every day, as well as when you have a critical need can be a major advantage.

There is an old adage that says, “Never trust a chef that doesn’t eat his own cooking.” You might think that the problem for the cook would be making sure that they don’t eat too much of their own cooking. But, if you’ve ever been a professional cook or chef as I was many moons ago, you know that sometimes you get so tired of being around food you don’t eat. I once cooked for an Italian restaurant, Café Amalfi, and I couldn’t eat red sauce for about a year after I left.

I have to wonder if printers and agencies feel the same way. They spend all day cranking out communications for clients and rarely do any marketing for themselves. It’s amazing to me how few companies, desperately seeking to deliver marketing services for clients, actually conduct ongoing campaigns for themselves.

Service providers – it’s time to eat your own cooking!

In prepping for this post, I called several service providers around the country, primarily regional firms that I’ve known for a while. I tried to focus on companies that used to mail to me when I was with Art Plus Technology or at Insight Forums. I started working on this thinking I would get a whole bunch of great examples to show. Instead, I got several types of responses to my request to “speak to the person who handles internal marketing for the company rather than marketing services for clients:”

1. A receptionist who told me that “we don’t have any one here who does that.” (Folks – an unhappy receptionist is not a good thing for your business – but I digress.)
2. A receptionist who told me that there was one person (sometimes two people) who does that, “but he spends most of his time on the road.” You know what? That sounds like a sales person – not a marketing person.
3. If I made it past the receptionist (typically by cheating and calling someone I already knew there) the answer was, “we used to do that – but we haven’t in a long time.”

Wow! “We used to.”

Used to have more business too – hmmm? See a corollary there? Sarcasm aside, I do understand. The economy is slow. Maybe  you’re short staffed. The cobblers children have no shoes etc. etc. But haven’t we been telling our clients and prospects that a downturn is the right time to get more attention for your marketing dollars because there is less activity out there? Telling them that you can’t afford to go silent just because things are slow? Telling them that direct marketing is important for maintaining your brand equity?

I repeat. Service providers. EAT. YOUR. OWN. COOKING! (and stop whining about the vegetables.)

One bright spot in my research efforts was Wilde – one of my local suppliers here in Boston (ironically I know them through restaurant connections as well – go figure.) I had been to a marketing seminar that Wilde offered in partnership with 3 other agencies last year (held at a restaurant ‘cause they’re foodies.) and I called to find out how often they did that kind of stuff. Clearly they are not only doing a lot – but tracking it too because Julie Sullivan and Liz Swanson were able to get info to me within hours of my request (and lookee – two live marketing people actually in the office –even during a snow storm!) Here’s what I found out:

Wilde has a formal   lead generation program to support their sales force. For the past year, they have had campaigns dropping every four to six weeks,

The campaigns promote downloadable content (white papers, tips sheets), webinars, and in-person seminars that showcase their direct marketing capabilities though thought-leadership (from creative strategies to operations best practices).

They use email,  direct mail pieces and are branching into inbound marketing channels, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and their blog (and providing content to 3^rd party blogs such as thedigitalnirvana.)

 70% of leads generated in 2010 were deemed “marketing qualified,” meaning they met the ideal customer/ prospect profile. Almost 30% of qualified leads led to a sales opportunity and half of those 2010 opportunities have already led to closed business (and more may convert since the sales cycle can be as long as two years). 

One of the other, less quantifiable benefits of this marketing effort has been an overall perception lift for Wilde. Because their lead gen campaigns centered on value-added direct marketing content, as opposed to pushing products,  clients are recognizing them as being experts in direct marketing—not just your run-of-the-mill lettershop.

That, my friends, is the value of eating your own cooking!

 I am sure that there are other companies out there investing in their own marketing well-being, but I sure couldn’t find them last week. If you’ve got some good examples to share – please get in touch.

In my last post I talked about the impact of workflow on in-plants and how it can help them stay relevant to the organizations they support. Now, as we shift our focus to the commercial print environment, there’s a temptation to focus on the similarities. Both serve customers, both aim to grow volumes and both are under pressure to offer more services, improve efficiency and compete more effectively. That’s where the similarities end.

While in-plants are under the gun to justify their value-add to the enterprise and prevent defection to external providers – those same external providers are wrestling with their own set of challenges.  Not the least of which is relentless pressure to deliver a profit month after month. In addition they must combat print suppression efforts,  satisfy the diverse requirements of more knowledgeable and demanding customers and make the transition from purveyor of ink to integrated service provider. All this at a time when core commercial print applications are under siege by alternate communication channels, the commercial print market is consolidating, volumes are declining and business in general remains stuck in an aimless recessionary grind.

Amidst this potent brew of challenges, digital print is increasingly seen as a requirement for survival, one that opens up new applications, opportunities and sources of revenue. Despite overall decline, the total print opportunity for 2011 is estimated to be an astounding 10 trillion pages. Of that number 2.1% or 216 billion pages are digital print – a number that’s expected to nearly double to 3.9% by 2014.

So if you’re a commercial printer looking to get your share of the growing digital opportunity, what’s workflow got to do with it? A lot, as it turns out. In fact, workflow can mean the difference between a print operation that’s rooted in the dark ages and one equipped to satisfy the expectations of 21^st century customers. Can streamlined digital workflow help commercial printers survive – or better yet, thrive – in the second decade of the new millennium? Yes -and here’s how:

1. As commercial print shops invest in digital print production, through workflow, they can expand their product offerings and expand into new markets that were originally out of market, becoming a true marketing services provider.
2. Software opens up the potential for commercial printers to handle multiple file formats and sizes, which allows for greater flexibility in the number of applications supported.
3. With a digital workflow, commercial print shops can store jobs electronically and print them digitally on demand. This, in turn, eliminates the need for longer runs and warehousing printed inventory.
4. With the ability to store files electronically, commercial print shops can turn jobs around quickly with minimal labor and processing, enabling a just-in-time production process.
5. As access to information increases and marketing messages become more targeted, a digital workflow that supports variable data and marketing messages enables commercial print shops to produce targeted, relevant communications that generate a better return on investment.
6. To meet demand for faster turnaround, shorter runs and variable data requirements, commercial print shops can implement web-to-print solutions that will offer the benefits of an online ordering system.
7. With digital workflow products that enable variable data document composition or streamlined make-ready, commercial print shops can diversify their product portfolios with value-added products and services.
8. With web-to-print and variable data solutions and increased application flexibility, commercial print shops can further strengthen customer relationships.
9. Overall, with digital workflow solutions that seamlessly route applications to digital print engines, commercial print shops can reduce production costs and improve efficiency.

In summary, an efficient digital workflow can facilitate the transition to integrated services provider, improve productivity and efficiency, enhance customer relationships and position commercial print shops to capture new opportunities. Want to weigh in? I’m interested to hear your take on the impact of a digital workflow on commercial print shops.

Are you “Facebooking” your prospects and customers? With today’s technology and the multiple ways you can interact with your prospects and get your message across, it’s important to take advantage of the more popular social media sites where your prospects and customers hang out. Did you know that Facebook has over 200 million active users? Don’t you think your current and future customers are among them? So stop putting off the inevitable and set up a Facebook business page so you can connect with prospects and customers, promote your products/services, and also the content you put out (articles, videos, audios, etc.) about your products and services.

Personal versus Business

Keep in mind that there is a difference between personal and business accounts on Facebook. Business accounts are limited in the information they are able to access compared to the standard accounts. You can’t send or receive friend requests. However, this shouldn’t prevent you from creating a business page for your company. In fact, there are benefits to business pages, where you can designate multiple administrators to manage and post to the account. Also, the pages are public and therefore will attain rank in Facebook and search engine results. A business page can garner “fans” and you can still post events, pictures, videos, polls and other interactive ways to promote your business and build the buzz.

So remember: profiles are personal but pages are business in Facebook world. So you’ll want to set up a page (not a profile). And remember to only create one account, because Facebook doesn’t take kindly to those who create multiple accounts.

After you create your Facebook business page, you want to gain “likes” from your professional network. Here are some ways you can build that fan base:

• Make sure your page is searchable by the general public. This is typically the default setting, but you may want to double-check and look at the Settings on the Edit page. Make sure your page is “Published (publically visible).”
• Announce your new Facebook page on your website / blog with a link to your page and an invitation to become a fan.
• If you have a newsletter, be sure to include the news about your new Facebook page.
• Send out an email to all your existing contacts asking them to check out your Facebook page, become a fan and leave a post.
• Leverage your other social media profiles and invite those connections and followers to check you out on Facebook. For example, if you’re active on Twitter, you should tweet the link to your Facebook page and ask your followers to become fans.
• Post a Facebook badge or widget on your website to let your site visitors know about your Facebook page.
• Think about using Facebook ads. Yes, it costs some money, but the advertising will get your business name in front of a lot of eyeballs.

Of course, it will be easier to get more fans as you build your page and add content that is informative and engaging. Add polls, events, links and videos. Invite commentary by posting questions. Pull in the RSS feed of your blog. Post about special discounts or coupons. As you build upon your page, current fans will share the page with their colleagues and friends and your fan base will grow.

Remember, Facebook is not just about information or entertainment. It’s also about relationship building. Connect with the people who “like” your page and respond to any posts by prospects and customers. It’s important to create a dialogue with your fans, rather than just have a running monologue of business information.

I found this diemensional promo piece in a Sheraton hotel room. It has different lenght panels with half inch tabs glued to the center. It makes a super-cool reveal – take a look!

Below is the embed code for this week’s fold: Sheraton Dimensional Promo Piece