[00:00]
Matthew: Hello and welcome everybody. Today is October 1st, 2009 and you’re watching PTV Live.

[applause]

Matthew: Awesome, awesome. My name is Matthew Mamet and I’m @msmamet on Twitter. With me is Mike Schneider.

[00:25]
Mike: Hi.

[00:26]
Matthew: Hi Mike. VP at Allen & Gerritsen and @schneidermike on Twitter. Glad to have you on the show today.

[00:31]
Mike: Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate being here.

[00:33]
Matthew: I look forward to talking to you. I want to remind everyone that we want to hear from you. Talk to us on Twitter by using the PTV Live hash tag. I’ll be monitoring the Twitter stream here on my old trusty MacTop and I will get those questions answered live.

But before we begin talking to Mike and learning about technology marketing, big news for next week’s show: we will be broadcasting live.

[00:55]
Mike: Huge news.

[00:56]
Matthew: Big news. From the In-Bound marketing summit. Visit this page: permissiontv.com/live on Wednesday. Not Thursday, Wednesday October 7th, same time, at 3:00pm and you’ll see Chris Brogan, Paul Gillan, C.C. Chapman, Jason Falls and Dave Carter discussing social media, specifically separating hype from reality. So looking forward to a really, really big show next Wednesday the 7th at 3:00pm.

You can see it live here on permissiontv.com/live.

[01:25]
Mike: That’s going to be epic. I’ll be there to see it.

[01:29]
Matthew: I’ll be there too.

[01:29]
Mike: Awesome.

[01:31]
Matthew: So Mike, I’m not sure that my introduction really gave you enough credit so give us a little more background. Who are you? Why are you here? What is the Mike Schneider experience all about?

[01:43]
Mike: The Mike Schneider experience…Mike Schneider or Schneider Mike as I’m known on Twitter. People have actually started to call me that in real life, which is fun.

[01:53]
Matthew: So I should refer to you as Schneider Mike from now on?

[01:54]
Mike: If you want to call me Schneider Mike, you can call me Schneider Mike.

[01:57]
Matthew: Done.

[01:58]
Mike: I work for a company called Allen & Gerritsen. We are a marketing and communications agency in Watertown. I run a group called the “Contributions group”, which is a little bit of emerging technology, a little bit of measurement. My background is in consulting. I went to Miami University which is in Ohio, damn it.

[02:21]
Matthew: So you see those scores come by and it’s like Miami and they always have to put in the Ohio?

[02:26]
Mike: The OH, yeah. The OH is in there.

[02:27]
Matthew: Not the Miami in…

[02:29]
Mike: They lose a lot more than the actual Miami in Florida, except in hockey.

[02:32]
Matthew: Well that’s true. The Miami in Florida is a tough program.

[02:35]
Mike: They did lose to BU in the hockey championship and I lost a bet and had to do a rap for…

[02:43]
Matthew: Are you a big hockey fan?

[02:44]
Mike: I am a big hockey fan. I like hockey.

[02:46]
Matthew: Well it’s certainly a hockey town so you’re in the right spot for that.

[02:48]
Mike: It is good; it is good. Great college hockey around here. So the Contributions group is, like I said, a measurement in emergent technology. It’s part of a bigger methodology that we use, which is we start with conversations, which is audience intelligence moving into connections and then contributions on the back end. So it’s an ROIN, when it’s about your audience, ROIL model.

[03:06]
Matthew: Excellent. Well that’s a good segue into the next question that I have which is: in prepping for the show, you had said Allen & Gerritsen has really broken through the tradition of the agency model. And I wanted to probe on that a little bit more. I think if you’re kind of outside of the agency life, looking in you see that a lot of agency websites or agency spokespeople are claiming that “Oh, we’re different” or “We’re unique” or “We have something that’s our special sauce.”

What do you bring to the table? What’s your special sauce? By you, I mean the Allen and Gerrisen team as a whole. What makes you able to get free from that model?

[03:45]
Mike: Well, we’ve got a couple of things. One is this idea of the 3 C’s. We’ve got what truly is an integrated approach. You can come to Allen & Gerritsen and you can get any of the 3 C’s by themselves or you can get them all together. You can get a couple of them. But regardless of whether you’re getting audience intelligence or you’re learning about your audience or you’re getting connections, which is media. Or you’re getting contributions, which is measurement strategies, segmentation or web analytics and things of that nature.

The other groups are involved because they all feed each other, they all feed into each other. Another way is that we’ve got products and methodologies that we use. So we’re trying to make things as repeatable as possible but also customizable. So in order to do that, we’ve thought about specific things that we’ve actually productized.

And I think that’s a little bit different.

[04:41]
Matthew: Let’s talk a little bit more about that. I saw on the blog that you have kind of branded your line of products: A&G Savvy is the name. One of the things that it’s –

Oh, get that back. You’ll need that.

[04:57]
Mike: Failure. Sorry.

[05:00]
Matthew: It’s all good. We’ll take it out in post, don’t worry about it. Oh wait, we’re live.

The blog post that announces the products says that they’re designed to optimize business efforts. Specifically, we talked a little bit about productizing measurement. And that really struck a cord with me because I’ve talked to a lot of experts here on PTV Live or other webinars or even out just out and about at Tweet Ups.

I think everyone is continuing to focus on the importance of measurement but there’s relatively few operationalized products for that. I think at a higher level, every VP marketing, every director of marketing understands that “I have to measure so I know my ROI and I can repeat that process.” That’s kind of like Marketing 101.

But the next level would be: OK, how do I do that in a repeatable way that I can operationalize as part of my every day activities and I don’t just kind of lose sight of it. Or on the other extreme, I get lost in so much data that it doesn’t tell me any real insight.

I think a lot of – like Google Analytics. Everybody uses Google Analytics because it’s free, it’s easy. But how do I get actionable insights out of your products because I can’t get that out of Google Insights?

[06:14]
Mike: Let’s look at A&G Digital Savvy first. Digital Savvy is our tool that allows us to measure the effectiveness of display and search. And so what we start off with is talking about the actions that are important on the site. So basically it’s feeding into user experience or feeding out of user experience.

So you’ve got something that you want somebody to do on a site and we look at those as indicating behaviors for specific segments, OK? So what we’ll do is we’ll put together a metric and it’s usually a cost per something. So cost-per-action metric.

So we build dashboards around that cost-per-action and then we use websites to drive people to those actions, OK? What you see in your output is that this site is very good at getting a particular segment of people to do something. So if it’s financial services, for instance, it’s like this one is very good
at driving financial advisors to the site. This one is very good at driving customers to the site – or, sorry, investors to the site, things of that nature.

So what we can do is we can go back and we can optimize the buy based on that. Now the product piece of that is the actual reporting. So we’ve got three levels of service: one is a whole mess of information that we can put out there with a small summary. It’s basically giving them the KPI – the key performance indicators.

And then the second level of it takes that down and boils it into a dashboard that gives somebody the two or three or four key points that they need to run their business in a day. And the third level of that is a summary for the ages. It’s this idea that OK, we’ve made all of these optimizations and we probably – and the media team for us, the connections team, remembers what those optimizations are but over time some of that stuff gets lost.

So what we do is we put together a giant deck summary, if you will, that visualizes everything that you’ve done and shows you where you’ve made optimizations. And we question whether we’ve made the right optimizations or not because sometimes the metrics can change over time. Sometimes the audience changes, sometimes things evolve and we try to put things in terms of apples to apples so you can see over time what’s happening. So that’s the Digital Savvy product in a nutshell.

[08:30]
Matthew: That’s a lot. That’s huge.

[08:32]
Mike: It’s cool.

[08:33]
Matthew: So you mentioned a lot and I’m going to try and pull it out and maybe drive into a few of them. You mentioned a lot about different websites and driving traffic, I would assume, to kind of your main website. So are you building kind of community sites and other blogs and portals and using them as kind of – I don’t know. Is it link bait, or kind of driving traffic more into a branded site? Is that part of the model at the front end?

[09:01]
Mike: Yeah, I mean there are obviously places that we want to drive people to, to experience some kind of message. Sometimes it’s a brand level message and sometimes it’s a specific call to action so there’s something more direct.

But at the end of the day you want to try to get everything to feed into something that is a call to action that will drive a sale at the end of the day or something like a sale. Sometimes you get into situations where you’ve got to come up with proxies for that because you’re not always a company that sells something. Sometimes you’re a company who is trying to get people to go to somebody else who is actually going to buy your product. So we come up with proxies for that kind of thing.

Some of the things we’re thinking about being able to do are to put more touch points into place that allow you to capture data and then enable both the B2B and the B2C relationship, if you know what I’m saying.

So we’re driving in that direction too.

[09:58]
Matthew: How about measuring different personas and how they navigate a site? I think one of the ongoing battles with web marketing in general is trying to make good on the promise of web marketing back when the Internet first exploded. Which is: we’re going to be able to personalize every site or every experience based upon every buyer’s unique set of needs.

That’s hard to do. I’ve actually had Mike Troiano in a couple of weeks ago and I asked him this question. He said, “Well, never underestimate the challenge of hard.” Sometimes if it’s just hard then you just can’t do it or you choose not to do it or you move on to other things.

How are some of these management tools built to take advantage of the fact that the CFO who visits the B2B product or service site is going to be interested in something completely different than the CTO or the developer?

[10:51]
Mike: Yeah, I mean the audience intelligence team attempts to anticipate those needs so when we build out these brand experiences, which is something that Allen & Gerritsen does, we’re taking those things into consideration. We’re trying to figure out what those paths are going to be.

Now what we do from there – so you’ve got basically strategists who are putting together the overall content strategy and then people are creating the content. And that can be basic flat site stuff or we’re recommending a lot more videos these days.

So you come up with these paths. So you’ve got user experience experts who are building up the site architectures and those folks pair up with the analysts. Those folks are trying to figure out what are the 20% of the pages doing 80% of the work? So you’re making that a very lean experience for people. You’re taking out the things that are not working or you’re basically sending them down different paths that are test and learn.

So we’re pairing those people up so it’s this idea of the analysts are going in with a little bit of user experience bend. And the user experience people are sitting with them and saying what’s important. And it’s not this idea of: let’s put the analyst in a silo or let’s get an analyst that has a bit of a user experience bend to them so they understand exactly what they’re looking at.

[12:18]
Matthew: So multi-disciplinary teams with kind of rapid inspection cycles. I would imagine that. So we launched the site three weeks ago or this campaign two weeks ago. What’s the traffic? What are the analysts thinking? OK, let’s feed that back into the UI team. Change the website, change the pattern. Sounds interesting.

[12:37]
Mike: Right. It’s cool stuff. Our clients are taking advantage of it. You know, it’s again the idea that we’re driving them to the site with the connections plan. We’re trying to optimize those paths once they get there and we’re trying to use these indicating behaviors to say, at the end of the day, which sites are actually performing for us so that we can eliminate the ones that aren’t. Then we can put more money into the ones that are.

[13:03]
Matthew: Great. So you mentioned a few seconds ago that you’re seeing that people are looking for video or you’re trying to talk a little bit about video with clients. That’s a great segue into the next question which is: We’ve always seen marketing agencies and brand agencies and ad agencies and companies that are somewhat similar to A&G as being the best place to go for new and exciting stuff on innovating technologies or ideas.

What are you pitching to clients today? What kind of cool and interesting stuff can you talk about with me today? You mentioned video as one of them. How core is that? What’s new?

[13:40]
Mike: We can’t talk about anything. The show is over. No, just kidding. Wrap it up.

[13:46]
Matthew: Well that’s it for today.

[13:49]
Mike: You know, A&G is a full service agency. We’ve got a lot of things that are going on. We’re doing a lot with emerging technology, we’re doing a lot in social spaces. We’re talking a lot about brand personification right now and we’re doing that for a few of our clients.

We’re pushing the conversation in B2B spaces. So you see a lot of brand personification for companies that are B2C related, but we’re getting to B2B conversations. So we’re taking brands and we’ve got a whole “people act like brands, brands act like people”. And we’ve got a whole sitting down with the clients and talking to them about the purpose of why we’re doing it and taking it from a situation where it’s kind of at a meta level and thinking about: All right, well what does this brand mean? And what are the tenets of the brand? How do we personify that?

When it becomes a person – because you should feel like you’re talking to a person – what’s the tone, what
’s the rhythm? Things of that nature.

[14:49]
Matthew: So rather than – for people who might not be familiar with that kind of idea. I’ll be honest, I’m not. A little bit. But it sounds to me like what the core tenet here is it’s important to get beyond kind of the logo and the flat text on the page and try to understand more on a human level. Who are the people who represent this brand? What are the experiences that I should expect if I start to do business with this company?

Kind of getting the human element which is kind of lost in the digital world and making it more real. Is that a good way of explaining it? Did I do a good job?

[15:29]
Mike: That’s it. If a brand – Hannaford, for instance – is about “Easy, healthy and affordable”. OK, that’s great and let’s put them out there in that sort of space. But what is that personality like? And not only that but how often are they pushing out content and what kinds of content are they pushing? And what kinds of conversations do they want to be involved in?

It’s this idea, like I said before, we talk about and we have the measurement team involved up front. So we’re measuring things like: what are the easy, healthy and affordable conversations and the key words around those? How do we measure that piece first?

And then it’s this idea of: Who is interacting with us and what do they care about? We’re trying to get to a model that helps us to prioritize what those conversations are.

[16:19]
Matthew: Are B2B companies interested in this more or less than they have been? I mean you mentioned a few seconds ago that this is kind of more the B2C thing that you’re pushing into the B2B space. It sounds a little bit to me that some B2B companies might say, “Do I really need this? I’m not a touchy-feely brand. I’m IBM and I’m Big Blue and that’s who I am. People do business with us because we’re reliable and low cost.”

Are you seeing that B2B brands are saying, “Look, you’re right, Allen & Gerritsen team. Social media is demanding that I reveal more of my personality or more of our brand personality online.” Or are they resisting it still?

[17:01]
Mike: Our clients, they’ve come from both angles. So it’s been us going in to the clients and saying, “This is something that you should be doing.” But we’ve also – from clients that you might not expect it to come from – some of these being B2B clients. They’ve come to us like, “We just went to this conference and we saw so-and-so speak on – like Kit Baudner, Wayne Sutton – speak on B2B social media and we have to have it now. Allen & Gerritsen help us. How can we do that?”

[17:34]
Matthew: So more and more B2B companies are getting this message and thinking that they’re behind, it sounds like. There’s a little bit of fear there, a little bit of urgency around that?

[17:43]
Mike: There’s some urgency and fear and the first thing we tell them is: “You’re not behind.” B2B has been slower to the game. The conversations for B2B are smaller out there right now and you can’t expect to go into these spaces and become a Whole Foods overnight.

We don’t think you should be, by the way. We think you should be having the conversations that matter to you with a highly targeted audience. So we want to be specific about the people we’re getting to with that.

[18:19]
Matthew: So B2C, it’s all a numbers game. I want to sell more cans of Coke. I want to get as many followers as I can so push the message out: “Coke is it” “Coke is it” “Coke is it”.

B2B land it might be more like: Let’s focus on the subset of people who actually are good fits for our products or services, who will need them. Because not everyone is going to need the type of specialized thing that we have.

[18:43]
Mike: Right, well, yes. B2C, if it’s a specialized product, we don’t advocate them going out and trying to be a Whole Foods either. But for companies like Hannaford, that’s a grocery store, we want them to get the geographies where they exist to as many people as possible because everybody has to eat.

[19:01]
Matthew: Everybody has to eat. You heard it here.

[19:06]
Mike: We think the product is excellent and they’ve got a good message. But back to your point. It is this idea of it is a niche. One of the great things about social media is that we have this ability to find these crowds now. You want to get into a crowd-sourcing conversation, you can. It’s this idea of I don’t want to be a rocket shipped to the middle any more. I don’t necessarily need a representative sample of the United States to come up with my ideas.

I want to find that niche of scientists who care about this particular cell and I probably can find them through social media, whether that’s Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or some other community that we’ve created.

[19:50]
Matthew: Right, sure, that makes sense. There’s some bazillion amount of unique communities that have been created so one of them, at least, has got to be specialized to whatever kind of target audience you’re looking for.

One thing I want to ask you is that you described yourself as a tech guy and you have a background in database technology and CRM technology. How do you see that as uniquely helping you in your role now, which is more marketing-services based, obviously. Doing things like brand personalization, which if you’re a developer, you’re like “What’s that?”

So how do you bring these two things together? Is it like you feel schizophrenic sometimes or do you feel like you’ve put them together?

[20:37]
Mike: I’m kind of a Renaissance guy. I can go deep on a lot of topics but I like to keep my options open. One day we can be talking about social media. Another day we can be talking about salesforce.com or we can be talking about burritos. Things of that nature.

[20:56]
Matthew: Or you can be talking about makeovers, right? Didn’t you just go through a makeover?

[21:03
Mike: I did just get a makeover at Ask Emmy. I had a social media makeover last night.

[21:05]
Matthew: How’d that go?

[21:07]
Mike: It was fun, I had a good time. My modeling debut. I had a little – I did Le Tigre from Zoolander. I gave my glasses a great trip.

[21:17]
Matthew: It sounds like you had a good time. I wish that I had an opportunity to get there but alas I did not.

[21:24]
Mike: We’ll see you at the next one. There will be a next one, I hope. Right Emmy?

[21:29]
Matthew: But anyway, we were talking about bringing these two left brain, right brain thinkings together.

[21:36]
Mike: I mean I’ve always had somewhat of a creative side to me. I like music and I like to create music and I’ve always liked to draw. When I was a kid I used to always hack around on computers. I went to Miami to get a business degree so it’s technology-focused but at the end of the day I’m more of a business guy.

I love solving problems. Come to me with a problem and I’ll try to come up with a solution for it. So that’s helped. Getting really deep into the technology – technology is making all this stuff happen right now so it’s really great to be able to understand some of the things that are happening right now so you can understand the limitations of a technology so you can propose a solution.

It helps me. Sometimes I can propose a solution on the fly and it can make sense.

[22:29]
Matthew: Marketing is definitely becoming more of a technologist’s game than kind of your art director’s game that it used to be.

[22:37]
Mike: That stuff still is super important though. But you’re seeing a convergence of that, where back in the day you wouldn’t hav
e seen your technology guys and your directors hanging out. But now you’ve got guys like Gary Greenberg and I who are paling around in the hall because he’s talking about this great idea for a community and I’m saying, “Well let’s use this technology to enable it.” So that’s pretty cool.

[23:01]
Matthew: I just want to remind everyone that next week PTV Live will be broadcasting live from the In-Bound marketing summit. You can visit this page that you’re watching right now, permissiontv.com/live on Wednesday October 7th, at 3:00pm. And yes, you’ll see Chris Brogan, Paul Gillan, C.C. Chapman, Jason Falls and Dave Carter. That’s going to be the biggest -

[23:20]
Mike: Epic!

[23:21]
Matthew: And Mike Lewis is going to be moderating. Mike Lewis also from Awareness, so…

[23:24]
Mike: Boston Mike?

[23:25]
Matthew: That’s right.

[23:26]
Mike: Bad Boston Mike will be there? I love that guy. 

[23:29]
Matthew: It’s going to be a lot of people on camera, first of all. A lot of people with pretty clear voices, pretty distinct voices.

[23:39]
Mike: Good ideas.

[23:40]
Matthew: And I’m interested to see –

[23:41]
Mike: “Thought leaders”.

[23:42]
Matthew: That’s right. They are thought leaders. I mean they’re not all Schneider Mike’s, but there’s a few that are, you know…

[23:47]
Mike: Only one. Thank goodness.

[23:51]
Matthew: After the show Mike, how can people find you? I’ve already mentioned that you’re @schneidermike on Twitter but how else can people connect with you?

[23:57]
Mike: Well, they can connect with me via Allen & Gerritsen. I also tweet for @allengerritsen with @gramnelson. So he and I are the voices behind that, and Christine Kaponak. You can connect with me via schneidermike.com as well. Or call the offices at Allen & Gerritsen. I’m always free for a conversation. Twitter, though, is the best way to get me.

[24:22]
Matthew: We actually planned most of this show, you and I, on Twitter.

[24:24]
Mike: We did.

[24:25]
Matthew: We had one maybe 15 minute, 10 minute phone call.

[24:28]
Mike: I’ve done business deals on Twitter.

[24:31]
Matthew: What was the most recent business that you did on Twitter. For the last couple of minutes that we have I want to hear about this.

[24:36]
Mike: The most recent business deal that I did on Twitter…Well, we’ve gotten inquiries on Twitter, which is great. We’ve gotten those sorts of things. But I did some value-added services community work with a person that I didn’t know at first and now I’ve become tight with.

So it’s really great. We got to know each other via Twitter and then I learned that we’re working with their organization. And then I was basically: “Let’s do some business.”

[25:06]
Matthew: So social media uncovered a connection that you didn’t know you had?

[25:10]
Mike: Exactly.

[25:11]
Matthew: That’s pretty cool. So, again, a reminder. We’re not live next Thursday so please don’t show up on Thursday, we won’t be here.

[25:18]
Mike: Watch this one again.

[25:19]
Matthew: We’re a day earlier, Wednesday the 7th. Thanks, and have a great week everybody. Please follow me, I’m @msmamet on Twitter and we’ll see you next Wednesday at 3:00pm. Bye bye everybody.