Watch the full webinar now.

This webcast features Forrester Analyst Julie Katz, author of “Your Email Marketing Road Map For 2009″ and Jay DeFoore, Director of Consumer Marketing at The Knot Inc. Julie and Jay will discuss how marketers can make the most of available tools and services to open doors for radical innovation in the channel.

Ms. Katz will reveal some of Forrester’s latest findings in her “How To Improve Email In 2009″ series, including 10 ways email marketers can get more from their programs today.

In this joint Baynote/Responsys webinar you will also find out how to:

• Target your emails based on observed website visitor behavior and interests
• Deliver emails at optimal times when customers are most receptive
• Measure the impact of your email marketing initiatives from email open rates to conversion and sales
• Test and Optimize to continually improve conversion results and ROI

Watch the full webinar now.

Some miscellaneous nuggets:
Consumer opinions online (61%) are nearly twice as trusted as search engine advertising (34%) and banner ads (26%), according to the 2007 Nielsen Online Global Consumer Study.

Less is the New More – overload is taking its toll. Content we care about will find us through clever combinations of friends and algorithms.

When I first learned PR it was a job filled with control.  We sent out highly crafted material to select audience of influencers and it was all about push, it was not a conversation.  Now just as PR becomes a role that multiple people in a company play, it is also a role that is blurring with customer service and customer care.  As many PR luminaries like Brian Solis keep saying, it’s a conversation. Sometimes letting go of that control has been hard but it has been well worth it.

The same shift, and the same release of control is happening to online marketers.  It is not about what you think is important, it is about what your site users think is important.  Turning site search and navigation over to the crowds might put you out of your comfort zone.  But our roles are changing.  If customer care really is part of our job, then it’s time we faciliate a conversation rather than make a speech.

While many marketers, website owners, and other business owners already know this, you’d be surprised how many of them use tools that rely on this overused and inaccurate metric. Many analytics, and even recommendation vendors, are relying on clicks as a KPI to either display to their customers or in the case of recommendations, to power their algorithms. The quality of recommendations or any kind of targeting based on user observation is no stronger than its ability to understand when and how a user has succeeded. Bounce rate, as Avinash points out, is just one of those metrics. At Baynote we track dozens of them, and clicks are by far the least utilized when validating success or failure.

Bottom line: When you are talking to analytics vendors, ad networks, or recommendations vendors ask them what KPIs their algorithms are relying on. If they say hits or clicks, they are idiots by Avinash’s definition, and he’s a smart guy.

Websites are now the primary way to get in touch with your customers, at least thats what Apple says and I agree. I’m not declaring the death of trade shows as a way to reach customers, but I am marking today on the calendar as the day where one of the biggest marketing machines in the world declared just that. This is a powerful message that will be heard around the world. Apple is usually the company that epitomizes a customer-centric company. Their company ideologies and methodologies have created arguably the most loyal and passionate customer base on earth.

That said, ensuring that your website users have the “Apple customer experience” should be a high priority for a company’s web strategy team. Enhancing the user experience means something different to all different types of businesses. A few months back I wrote up a post on just that. Bottom line, greet your customers with relevant information immediately and stay in touch with them on their terms(no irrelevant email blasts).

Over the last few months, we have had some of our best successes, and this is greatly due to the cost savings and campaign optimization gained by our customers. While our service isn’t free, the fuel that powers it is, your website community.

Why spend lots of money driving people to your website when there are search and navigation pitfalls? If your car was leaking oil, would you just fill it backup up with oil, or fix the leak first?

Check out our Mob Marketing Webinar to learn how to plug the leaks in your website.

As we worked with Suresh Vittal of Forrester Research to put together the content, Jack, Suresh and I frequently hearkened back to a similar “sea change” that happened in the early days of content management.  In 1998, we spent much of our time talking to journalist, analysts and customers about unlocking the so-called webmaster bottleneck.  If you could only put web publishing in the hands of the internal content experts, then you could eliminate this delay created by having a “webmaster.”  By 1999 when we went public, everyone got it.

But unlocking this bottleneck created a new bottleneck – people finding the information they needed.  Now we suffered from content overload — because organizations kept producing more and more content and there was no efficient means to make sure that the content you showed was the content people needed or the products people wanted.  Organizations tried to fix it by investing in complex search engines or analytics or profile-based personalization.  None of this fixed the fundamental problem.

It’s time to get rid of the expert bottleneck.  In this economy, the timing is perfect.  There are some task that will always be manual but there are others that can and should be automated.   Automate for a better user experience.  Automate for efficiency. Turn what people see on your site over to the Mob.  It might make you feel a little uncomfortble now, but so was the idea of eliminating the webmaster bottleneck in 1999.  I say FUGETABOUTIT.

Yesterday, one of the conference attendees that visited our booth created a blog post explaining her take on targeting technologies, but on a personal level.

My favorite part of Baynote’s technology: it ignores demographics. Yes! When are people going to figure out that this is an individualistic age? Advertisers, you are wasting your dollars on serving me with endless weight-loss and dating ads. Not all 27-year old females are the same!

I’d have to agree with this point, not all 27 year old females are the same. Not simply because I’ve seen our technology benchmarked against demographic or profile based targeting technologies(which I have), but also because my 27-year old wife would have me sleeping on the couch if I said otherwise.

If you are a new reader, or would like more background on our contextual targeting approach, check out our whitepaper “In Search of The Human Element.”

Let your website do the targeting

The instance a user lands on your website, they begin communicating with you. Its not always loud, but if you are listening this will become clear. They speak with their bounce rates, exit pages, entrance pages, site search terms, mouse movement, and many other web actions. This communication is not necessarily a function of generation, but one of context. By trying to focus on who your users are, which is expensive and typically inaccurate, you can lose focus on what really matters, their context. A user’s context drives their intent, and being tuned to that allows you to unlock the Collective Intelligence of your website. No marketing team or focus group with demographic data will be able to match the insight gathered from the collective intelligence on your website.

A Collective Intelligence Powered Site

So what does a site that is powered by its collective intelligence look like? This site will bring the right content to the right users as soon as they land on a website. Each page will recommend the content or products that will most likely result in a successful conversion. Search results will be tuned into the context of the search and reflect usage of the results by monitoring successes and failures of searchers. The Search Marketing strategy of the website will pivot around the keywords used by the users that are driven organically from Google and used in the site search. Landing pages will be dynamically created with the content or products found most useful by users and will update real time to reflect these shifts. eMail marketing campaigns driven by site observations will include clusters of products and content within the same context to increase engagement. Marketers will utilize reporting of the website’s collective intelligence to drive mutli-channel strategies including offline and mobile channels.

Automatic, not Autonomous

Harnessing the collective intelligence is not about creating an autonomous website. It aids marketers in providing a complete user experience that will create customer loyalty and bring users back to the site for future transactions. Solutions that harness the collective intelligence of your site must provide reporting and management interfaces that allow you to apply business rules and push promotional content or products. This mechanism allows you to maintain control of your site while using the collective intelligence to automate laborious and intensive data-driven tasks.

Discover Context, not Identity

Leveraging collective intelligence on the web is about understanding the context of your users through observing their interactions with your website, not their identity. By not requiring demographic information, the act of gathering your site’s collective intelligence is not perceived by your customers as an invasive practice. Therefore, this contextual approach is not only an effective and powerful targeting technique, but it keeps your brand intact by maintaining the trust of your users.

Web Applications like Baynote Social Search are excellent at solving a specific problem across many different types of businesses. However, the power of Social Search is only possible because of the SaaS platform that drives it, the Collective Intelligence Platform(CIP). SaaS platforms drive powerful applications that can be custom fit or designed specifically for a designated use through the API. A robust platform will provide access to relevant data which in turn can be used to develop valuable applications. As companies continue to differentiate their product offerings, custom software solutions become increasingly necessary while making it difficult to create “one-size-fits-all” web applications. Today data is the most valuable commodity and SaaS platforms, like the Baynote CIP, provide companies with the tools necessary to build applications with highly relevant data.

Lets step back and imagine a world where Behavioral Targeting services and Contextual Targeting services lay down their arsenals and rejoice in consumer targeting brotherhood. That day is here. Check out Jack Jia’s interview over at Behavioral Insider where he discusses the power of combining behavioral and contextual targeting techniques to bring balance to the force. After all, two heads are better than one.