Monday, January 10, 2005
Just one little clarification...
Well, another lesson about being vigilant about Googling, Technorati'ing, PubSub'ing and Feedstering yourself.
Today I found this blog write up which mentions my saga about how I started blogging for theatres.
The author may have picked it up from my recent profile on Vault.com, or perhaps from my earlier one on About.com...both profiles mention the whole "lunch with a friend" catalyst for my decision to form Worker Bees.
I appreciate her finding my story encouraging enough to write about, but I did have to email her to correct something in it.
The customer who got the excellent results she mentions is Foothill Music Theatre, not TheatreWorks.
Foothill was the first theatre to give my new idea a shot, and they were rewarded with pretty immediate, positive results.
As I pointed out to Deborah, the blogger in question, one of the reasons they were so successful is that they really allowed me to treat it as a true marketing effort...complete with customer-friendly discount offer and trackable promotions. This allowed them to get greater conversion of reader to ticket holder, but even more so, to track that conversion.
I continue to believe that if a customer wants to quantify their foray into this kind of online marketing effort, they have to approve the same kind of offers they would for other marketing programs. It's fine if a customer simply wants a blog to add dynamic content to their web site, and are wiling to pay simply to have that content, confident that it will eventually payoff in more loyal and regular customers. I believe that blogs are great customer outreach tools. Certainly the Saturn exec who just started a blog is not going to be able to associate car sales directly to his blogging efforts.
But if they want to quantify how the blog helps generate ticket sales, they can't rely on anything but a trackable promotional code to do it!
So say I!
And I hope the blogger posts the correction and gives Foothill the credit they deserve.
[Not to mention that TheatreWorks probably would be surprised to see those results claimed for their blog, given that they did not institute trackable promotions. I would hate to have them think I'm using them as such a reference, when I'm not.]
Today I found this blog write up which mentions my saga about how I started blogging for theatres.
The author may have picked it up from my recent profile on Vault.com, or perhaps from my earlier one on About.com...both profiles mention the whole "lunch with a friend" catalyst for my decision to form Worker Bees.
I appreciate her finding my story encouraging enough to write about, but I did have to email her to correct something in it.
The customer who got the excellent results she mentions is Foothill Music Theatre, not TheatreWorks.
Foothill was the first theatre to give my new idea a shot, and they were rewarded with pretty immediate, positive results.
As I pointed out to Deborah, the blogger in question, one of the reasons they were so successful is that they really allowed me to treat it as a true marketing effort...complete with customer-friendly discount offer and trackable promotions. This allowed them to get greater conversion of reader to ticket holder, but even more so, to track that conversion.
I continue to believe that if a customer wants to quantify their foray into this kind of online marketing effort, they have to approve the same kind of offers they would for other marketing programs. It's fine if a customer simply wants a blog to add dynamic content to their web site, and are wiling to pay simply to have that content, confident that it will eventually payoff in more loyal and regular customers. I believe that blogs are great customer outreach tools. Certainly the Saturn exec who just started a blog is not going to be able to associate car sales directly to his blogging efforts.
But if they want to quantify how the blog helps generate ticket sales, they can't rely on anything but a trackable promotional code to do it!
So say I!
And I hope the blogger posts the correction and gives Foothill the credit they deserve.
[Not to mention that TheatreWorks probably would be surprised to see those results claimed for their blog, given that they did not institute trackable promotions. I would hate to have them think I'm using them as such a reference, when I'm not.]
// posted by ElisaC @ 1:54 PM 
