Why—you may ask—are our faces plastered all over our Website? Don’t we staff art directors that can scour stock photo sites for symbolic, motivational imagery? Don’t we have any copywriters that can come up with clever verbiage to communicate what our customers can expect from us as an agency? Or are we really just that self-involved?

Well, to be honest, we sort of are. Not self-involved in the traditional sense, but in the sense that the only ones involved—in our agency and in our clients work—are ourselves. The expectation we want to set is that what customers can come to expect from our agency is us.

We believe in candor—we come correct with each other as well as with our clients. If we show up at your office and promise to dedicate ourselves to your account, we’ll deliver on that promise. Unlike larger agencies that send senior management to the pitch but assign your business to a junior team back at the office, with us, who you see is what you get. And what you get are six people who know better than to sell themselves with marketing buzzwords and stock photography. Six people who will show that same discern for your business and your brand. We promise.

Thousands who want to stay in the know of the latest trends in search and social marketing attend the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Expo every year. During this 4-day conference, experts advise through lectures, seminars and workshops the many ways search can be used to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Recently, Vertiyo was hired by SES to refresh the look of their conference and design a brochure outlining this year’s calendar of events. To do so, we utilized the theme of connectivity, a concept that is rooted in the fundamental objective of SES. The event is designed to makes sense of all aspects of search and online marketing, to help attendees connect their businesses to all the different promotional approaches available via search, as well as connect themselves with other marketers.

A key challenge was crafting a new concept that would seamlessly integrate with the existing SES brand logo and color. We updated these elements by framing them in a clean, contemporary context, using vibrant secondary colors, current type treatments, and appealing graphics. The overall aesthetic vision is designed to convey a sense of the myriad technical subjects addressed at the conference, and to illustrate it in a way that is appealing to professionals both inside and outside the search industry.

If you’re interested in learning more about the event, visit: www.sesnewyork.com

How do you know when you’ve come up with a good idea? When Pearl Jam comes up with the same exact one.  The band that testified against Ticketmaster, toured with Neil Young, and taught us how to Rock the Vote, is now giving away their music for—well, not a song, but a tweet.

To promote their new album, Backspacer, they’re asking fans to talk about their new song “Just Breathe” on Twitter. In exchange for the tweet, fans will receive a code which allows them to download a live version of the song from iTunes for free.

Sound familiar?

Those of you who follow the goings on in the Vertiyoverse will know about a little product we created months ago called TweetPromoBuilder.com. On our site, anyone with a free offer to promote—be it a discount code or a download—can set up a twitter ad asking customers to send a tweet in exchange for the giveaway.

And speaking of followers, Pearl Jam’s free song isn’t completely without its strings. By sending the tweet on the site set up specifically for the band’s Twitter promotion, the Pearl Jam twitter feed will automatically be added to the list of those that you follow. TweetPromoBuilder.com offers that as an option, allowing users to forgo it.

Is this what the future holds for us marketers? Is promotion going to become one big online popularity contest where consumers can use their status as currency and hock it for wares? If so, then may the smartest kids win.

A great new TV spot I can’t get enough of – the new HTC “You” campaign.

Its not the great writing, or fantastic music, or even the fact they tie this campaign perfectly to their “You” website – but these guys managed to make two great spots, one that focuses on the consumer and their wants, needs and desires and another that shifts the focus to the device and its connection to the user.

One spot calmly declares “…You need to laugh, and you need to cry, and you just can’t get her out of your mind…” Making the emotional connection between us as users and our phones.

The other “…It stresses you out, it calms you down, it helps you remember, it helps you forget, it keeps you connected, its the only thing you own – that is always in arms reach…” reinforces that by flipping it around to be about the phone, but still about ‘you’.

Their website ties the whole thing together, and incorporated the “You” idea into how you should even think about their line of phones: “You want to tweet wherever you are”, “You want everyone on the same page”, “You want to get organized”, etc.

So after 2 months of development and design I’m happy to announce TweetPromoBuilder.com is ready to go.

We created Tweet Promo Builder so that anyone could create a customized twitter promotion without writing a single line of code.

Lets say you’re a website owner who often gives away white papers and presentations or you’re an online store owner who likes to offer your customers discount codes. Well rather than just giving those away, or just asking for an email address now you can require your users to send a tweet in order to get what you’re offering. So now instead of just one person getting your promo you are reaching that users followers and enticing them to come to your site, where in turn they will have the same opportunity to send a tweet to gain access to your offer, effectively sending your promotion viral.

How it basically works on a site:

1. A user visits a page or site with your Tweet Promo.
2. They opt-In for your offer and send the tweet you’ve required
3. Automatically, a tweet featuring your promo is posted on their Twitter feed seen by all their followers. Then, using Twitter’s own API, the system immediately confirms that their tweet was sent
4. User instantly gets access to your promo code, a website, or file to download

Normally to create something like this you’d have to hire a programmer familiar with Twitter’s API every time you wanted to run a promotion.

Instead, subscribers to Tweet Promo Builder can simply customize a new promotion from the options available through their control panel. They can offer their viewers a promo code, a web page, or if they’re a premium subscriber- a file.

Our Tweet Promo Builder system instantly generates the necessary code – Then they simply copy and paste the code to their site or blog.

TweetPromoBuilder “Code Generation” Screen

TweetPromoBuilder “Promo Reports” Screen

Here’s an example – try it and get a code for 20% off the monthly subscription price at TweetPromoBuilder.com

I also created a video walk-through to help illustrate the features and how the whole thing works on any site.

In direct marketing there is no cut and dry methodology or guide that will be guaranteed to turn out the best results for the company’s money. So the trusty marketing executive must test upcoming campaigns to forecast optimum effectiveness. Advertising, by nature, is a bit of an educated gamble in terms of ROI, return on investment. In other words, does the ad campaign make you worthwhile money in return?

Because there is no sure fire marketing method, the fight over where to spend advertising dollars is one that every marketer faces. Unlike a lot of other advertising mediums, direct mail allows for a very quick ROI gauge. Whether using email or postal mail, there are several ways that the responses can be measured for effectiveness. Think about all the junk mail you receive – virtual and postal. Most of this flow is direct mail campaigns at work.

Let’s first look at the conversion rate. Conversion rate is applicable to both postal mail or email and measures the response to your “call-to-action” of your sales offer. Did you tell interested clients to sign in to your website? For postal mail recipients, did you ask that they call a specific number and mention a sales code for a discount on your product? Did they buy your product after receiving your ad? These are all ways of measuring conversions for postal direct mail.

Measuring conversions online is becoming very accurate, thanks to web cookies. Cookies, as per www.whatis.com, are “…information that a Web site puts on your hard disk so that it can remember something about you at a later time. Typically, a cookie records your preferences when using a particular site.” A website can track when a user visits the site for the first time, possibly in response to a call to action from your postal or email direct mail ad.

Considering the extended use of email nowadays, for all sorts of communications, it’s safe to say that it’s easier to measure direct mail responses when the ads are sent online. There are three possible ways to do this, and they are all useful in gauging the success of your direct mail campaign.

The bounce rate of an email measures the percentage of the email that is undeliverable. Either the address doesn’t exist, the recipient server is having issues or you’re email gets dumped into a SPAM blocker. The reason for these bounces can be searched out by your ISP, Internet Service Provider, or your technician. By analyzing the reason behind the bounced emails, you can update your recipient address list to be more effective.

The open rate, the percentage of email that arrives at the destination email and is opened, also lets you see how accurate your contact list is. If you have sent an opt-in email, asking for the recipient to sign up to your website, you’ll see the highest percentages. HTML emails with graphics allow the server to generate a count when the email is opened. Be careful with HTML, as recipients email servers can junk emails with graphics or leave out the picture altogether for security purposes, making the email unusable. Adding a message in the email that it must be viewed in HTML can help with this problem.

Along with HTML emails, a click-thru option within the email can be used to allow your direct mail recipients direct access to you website. This measuring tool acts like the conversion rate to track replies in that it can be counted thru software attached to your website as the user “clicks in”. Some software comes with a reporting service that allows you to view the success rate of the click-thru option on an interim basis.

Measuring direct mail response is integral to increasing your rates of a successful ad campaign. Keep in mind the many options that exist to do this, and that they can all work together to paint a very clear picture of your direct mail campaign’s viability to make the most of your advertising dollars.