The Marketing Technology Blog

Do you know? How about your database? Is your domain resolving? Are your site and pages up but just serving database errors?

We actually had an instance a couple weeks ago where our site was fully operational, but we were running into issues with the number of database connections. Unfortunately, we found out by an unhappy client notifying us. He didn’t understand why he had to bring it to our attention - he was right!

My predecessors had done the right thing and signed up with a monitoring service. It was a fairly pricey service at $49.95 per month. When I logged in, I was immediately lost trying to find my way around but I eventually figured out that we were only resolving our home page. We weren’t testing for an SSL certificate, we weren’t testing our subdomains, we weren’t checking whether or not the database was responding.

I quickly began to add another check and moved the time from 5 minute intervals to 1 minute intervals. When I clicked to submit the new ‘watch’, I was shocked to see that I would be charged a $99 setup fee and another $49.95 per month. That’s right - a $99 setup fee for something that I set up!!! I logged out and began searching for a new service.

I jumped on Twitter (my new search engine) and good friend, Ade Olonoh of Recursive Function, came to the rescue. (More blogging - less twittering Ade!)

Ade pointed me to Pingdom. Pingdom has an incredibly clean interface with very robust features. I programmed a couple of API calls for our application to ensure that the database was running and then I setup Pingdom to pass the calls and check the response.

The service is very reasonable as well. The basic is $9.95/mo and allows 5 checks, 20 SMS messages, unlimited email, uptime and load time reports, checks down to every minute, HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, Ping and UDP checks, etc. The Business service allows 30 checks and 200 SMS messages. They also have a very robust API if you’d like to integrate your monitoring.

The probe servers are in Dallas, Berkeley, Amsterdam, Vasteras, and Reading. I am trying to find out if I confirmed with Pingdom that we can bypass the SMS by simply building an email list of SMS email addresses for our staff’s mobile phones.

I also wrote the company with a feature request. It would be fantastic if, aside from Email and SMS alerts, they allowed an HTTP Request. This would allow me to monitor one of our 3rd party vendors who has been having issues lately. If I could have Pingdom make a request to my server, I could automatically switch our services over to a backup. Once the system came back up, I could have it switch back. I could do this with email; however, the delay could bite us.

We have 29 days left on the trial. As long as we don’t see any issues, we’re going to jump on the basic package. That alone will save us a few bucks and provide us with much more comprehensive site monitoring!

I spoke with my friends over at Bitwise Solutions today and they are offering a FREE seminar on Thursday to readers of this blog! (Registration for other folks is $20!).

Where: BitWise Solutions
11460 N. Meridian St., Suite 110 Carmel, Indiana 46032
When: Thursday, April 10, 2008
Time: 8:30 - 10:00 am
Reserve your Seat: Call Kim Smith at 317.805.4376 x200

What you’ll be learning

Finding keywords that drive conversions, one page optimization, integrating paid search, internal linking and link building will help you to achieve higher ranking results within the different search engines. Jim Brown President of EverEffect explains how you can achieve a higher ranking.

Who’s Teaching?

Good friend of mine, Jim Brown, will be leading the session. Jim is an expert in business development. Founder and President of the marketing firm Accent Creative Group; Jim developed and implemented marketing initiatives that enabled the firm to double its revenues during each of its first three years in business. Jim’s insightful and innovative approach to marketing led to his listing in The 2006 Who’s Who of Small Business Marketing.

Jim is also a veteran of the United States Marine Corps.

Digg It!

This was an exciting year in online technology. If you look at it from a 10,000 foot view, humans are really still blazing a trail on how to utilize this relatively new medium, the Internet. Perhaps it’s obvious but I believe 2008 is really the year that applications and strategies go Micro.

The evolution of the social web (Web 2.0) is now moving rapidly into new, targeted territory. The massive, one-fits-all solution will be evolving to provide you with the right connections to the right people and the right content… at the right time.

1. Email has transcended the typical use for eNewsletters and is gaining momentum in the transactional world. Rather than providing it’s own ‘event’ the email send is now triggered as part of an overall marketing strategy to retain users and keep them connected to their retail outlet, their social network, the blogs they read, etc.

   Email is also evolving, despite the limitations of mainstream email clients. Email is going micro… more timely messaging, more control, and more event driven.

2. Blogging has gone Micro with Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. Quick snippets that create virtual conversations from one to many.

   Companies are already starting to employ Microblogging, but we’ll see the retail use of Microblogging in 2008. We’ll also see groups better leveraged in Micro-blogging… much like chat rooms evolved in public chat applications a decade ago.

3. Social Networks are moving away from the monolithic strategies of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Plaxo… and move to the micro social networks of Ning (note: SmallerIndiana, NavyVets, Sports Marketing 2.0, IndyLance are a few I’ve started or am involved in!).
4. Bookmarking sites such as Digg are being abandoned for sites like Mixx - where you can set up Micro Groups to join. I’d encourage everyone who reads my blog to contact me for an invite to Online Marketing Group so we can share links. Other applications like Truemors will continue to pop up with refined targeting capabilities rather than preselected categories.
5. Geographic Information Systems online are being leveraged more and more to go micro. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft continue to enhance regional data for improved Geographic searches. Google is even supporting KML in sitemaps, to geographically identify and index your websites!
6. Video is going Micro (post updated with recommendation from Nil’s comment at Scobleizer). Utterz, Seesmic and QIK. Video and mobile phone technologies are converging, enabling people to record and upload video much easier with better quality!
7. Software as a Service Applications will continue to be pressured to be flexible enough for branding and integration into other applications or other brands. No more is the ‘canned’ application good enough for us to buy and put up, we must leverage CSS technologies to transform our applications to any environment. We must build applications that are capable of being modified to the smallest (micro) detail.

There you have it, my prediction for 2008 - the year of the micro strategy and micro business application. The ability to create like groups, geographically centric applications, micro-branded SaaS, or simple social groupings will be fully leveraged in 2008. Those who won’t adapt will be forgotten.

We had a fantastic meeting with a national company today and discussed putting an email program into place. The company has over 125,000 clients nationwide, 4,000 salespeople… and no email program. They have 8,000 products with 40 or 50 new products each month that the manufacturers are dying for them to sell. They’re worried about the cost of the email program though and are wondering where the money will come from.

This is one of those relationships that I wish I could put together at no cost and simply charge a commission!

In the above example, I’m guessing that they can get an email address for 1 out of every 3 clients by the end of the year. In reality, the program should generate much more interest and many more emails, but I want to be on the safe side. I’m estimating 1 email per month - not weekly. Each client already makes purchases every month, so the email is really there to try to increase sales from existing clients. I threw in a pitiful 0.75% response rate with an average (very conservative) $5 in additional spending. For the Email Service Provider, I’ve added $0.03 per email… on the high side.

With all of these conservative estimates, the output is still a startling 25% Return on Investment. Additionally, email will drive more orders through their ecommerce site - saving on erroneous orders and manpower costs. Moreover, with their vendors chomping at the bit for attention, the company could sell premium advertising space in their newsletters! I reviewed the advertising costs on one industry newsletter today and the average advertisement was $0.02 per email and there were 4 spots in each newsletter.

Selling 4 spots in each email would push the ROI upwards of 300%!

I sure wish they could figure out how they’re going to afford this.