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Hub Investors — A Good Financial List?

July 31st, 2009

Even with more than 60,000 mailing lists on the market, I still couldn't find a mailing list for hub investors. If you are looking for a financial market niche, then this may be one to take a closer look at. Who are these investors? How can they be identified? You may just want to settle for an accurate definition for now.

Usually, when posting a new blog entry I do so with the intention of providing helpful marketing knowledge or resources, like the most recent social media cheat sheet. However, this time I'm asking for a little help with the following questions:

1) Would hub investors be a meaningful segment?

2) How could these individuals be identified?

Here's what I've learned so far. According to Investopedia, there is an investment structure called the 'Hub and Spoke Structure', in which several investment vehicles pool their assets together by contributing to one central investment vehicle. Each investment vehicle remains individually managed; the smaller investment vehicles are referred to as the "spokes" and the central investment vehicle is referred to as the "hub".

This model insulates the 'hub investors' from taxes incurred by the 'spoke investors' on foreign investments. That's the best I can do for now, so I'll invite a few foreign investment specialists to comment with a better explanation.

From a marketing perspective, I would expect that these individuals are saavy investors, with capital resources and good accountants. They also may be investing in some emerging international markets. If they could be identified, would they be good prospects for The Economist or Foreign Affairs? I'm thinking that many of them already subscribe to Forbes.

For more information about the 'hub and spoke' investment structure, you may also want to check out the definition for the 'master-feeder' structure on Wikipedia.

Tags: definition, hub, hub investors, investment structure, list, spoke
Posted in Economy | Comments Off

Encouraging Employees to Serve the Upper Valley

July 31st, 2009

A new NextMark / marketing INFORMATION network (mIn) employee benefit was added this year, providing paid time off (PTO) for community service. This benefit encourages employees to take time away from the 'busyness of business', get away from the office, and do some community service work.

One local Christian organization, Christ Redeemer Church facilitated a Service Project Day on July 15, 2009. One NextMark employee (me) decided to participate. It was tough work painting a pool house in the sun, but I enjoyed every minute of it — especially the people I got to work with that afternoon.

Over 180 volunteers were sent out to 23 different locations, serving various organizations and individuals throughout the Upper Valley.

"Collectively we logged over 700 volunteer hours. This is by far the largest number ever! It was awesome to see how many volunteers rallied for this monumental effort," said Don Willeman, Pastor of Christ Redeemer Church (CRC).

"One of the highlights was the incredible accomplishment of our crew at Storrs Pond. We took on the repainting of the pool area bathhouse—a task the Storrs Pond staff was skeptical we could complete. Matthew Marshall, the General Manager of the Hanover Improvement Society, was stunned not only with the quality of the work, but also with the fact that we were able to get it done in just one day. Many worked late into the evening, in order to complete the work."

Here are a few other organizations that benefited from 2009 Service Project Day:

Hanover Police Department
Hanover High School
Richard W. Black Community Center in Hanover
Upper Valley Hostel in Hanover
Howe Library in Hanover
David’s House in Lebanon
Upper Valley Land Trust in Hanover
Hanover Water Works
Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich
The Family Place in Norwich
The Haven in White River Junction
The Re-Cover Store in White River Junction
Upper Valley Senior Center in Lebanon
Lebanon Recreation Department
Seminary Hill School in Lebanon
Hannah’s House in Lebanon

It was encouraging to see how much was accomplished in a single day! I was impressed by how many of our youth were engaged in different service activities. It was a very hot day and I did not hear a single complaint from any of them.

The new PTO for Community Service benefit is available to all NextMark and mIn employees located in New Hampshire, New York, and Oklahoma.

Tags: christ redeemer church, community service, hanover, lebanon, upper valley
Posted in Culture and Society | Comments Off

NextMark featured in new book: Contemporary Direct & Interactive Marketing

July 30th, 2009

Direct marketing is going through a transformation. Some suggest re-branding direct marketing techniques as "interactive marketing" because of the highly personal two-way relationship it enables.

Dr. Lisa Spiller and Martin Baier have just published a second edition of their book entitled Contemporary Direct & Interactive Marketing that investigates this transformation. It illustrates the latest and greatest methods employed by leading practitioners.

While every marketer agrees that your choice of mailing lists is fundamental to the success of your marketing program, few marketing books cover this topic in any depth. I was pleased to see that Spiller and Baier bucked this trend and gave the topic coverage it sorely needs in Chapter 3 – "Developing Lists and Discovering Markets"

I was also honored they showcased NextMark and our Mailing List Search Tool in their opening vignette, which includes the following passage:

"The challenge for most marketers is to locate appropriate lists that will enable them to communicate with prospects that are likely to have a need for their products or services. Fortunately, this task has become much easier due to the advances in technology, the availability of lists, and companies like NextMark.

[… step by step instructions on using the list finder …]

"NextMark is building the technology to help eliminate the administrative headaches associated with developing lists and discovering markets. So if you want to effectively prospect for new customers, visit NextMark at www.NextMark.com and explore its list finder — you will be pleasantly surprised at how easy prospecting can be with highly targeted lists."

Here is what else you will find in that chapter on mailing lists.

Lists as Market Segments
- A Perishable Commodity
- Types of Lists
- Development of House Lists
The List Industry
- List Users
- List Owners
- List Brokers
- List Managers
- List Compilers
- Service Bureaus
Evaluation of Lists
- Measurement of Results
- Response Differences Attributable to Timing
The Nature of Market Segmentation
- Product Differentiation
- Product Positioning
- Segmenting Business Markets
The Bases for Market Segmentation
- Geographic Segmentation
- Demographic Segmentation
- Social factor Segmentation
- Psychographic Segmentation
- Behavioral Market Segmentation
- Using multiple Segmentation Bases
ZIP Code Areas as Market Segments
- Geographic Structure
- ZIP+4
- Clustering Areas to Segments
- Availability of Statistical Data

Purchase the book through our Amazon store here.

Tags: Contemporary Direct & Interactive Marketing, direct marketing, Dr. Lisa Spiller, interactive marketing, Mailing Lists, Martin Baier, NextMark
Posted in Books | Comments Off

Top 100 Social Media Cheat Sheet for Business

July 22nd, 2009

Social marketing is on the rise and it’s here to stay. Are you still trying to figure out how to leverage social media for your business? You can start by learning the language with definitions from the marketing glossary, and then use this cheat sheet as a reference for most commonly used tools.

A few months ago a cheat sheet was introduced as a tool to help marketers get organized with Web 2.0 and social media marketing. Many new services have emerged since then. Therefore, several of those respective web sites have been added to this page as a quick reference linking to 100 free social marketing resources and online directories.

Bookmark this page or add it to your favorite places for quick and easy access to several of the top services by category. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, and some of these sites may not be the top choices internationally. However, it is a valuable resource for leveraging many of the top networks in the U.S., and can help you gain some international exposure as well.

Basic services must be free to qualify for inclusion on the top 100 list below. For your convenience, each title is linked directly to the respective site’s home page. I hope you will find this to be a helpful resource for your business. Feel free to connect with me (DeMartine) on LinkedIn if you would like to share other resources that are available online.

________________________________________________________________________

Free Social Media Resources (Top 100)

Aggregation Tools (5): Bloglines, FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm, Lijit, YouBundle

Blogs (7): Blog.com, Blogger, Livejournal, Posterous, Tumblr, Typepad, WordPress

Blog Directories (10): Blogapedia, Blogarama, BlogCatalog, Blogdirs, Blog Flux, Bloghub, Blog Listing, Blogtoplist, BritBlog, Technorati

Bookmarks (12): Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Fark, Mixx, MyBlogLog, Newsvine, Propeller, Reddit, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz

Comment Systems (2): DISQUS, IntenseDebate

Free Directory Listings (25): Akama, Bateekh, BizHWY, Cardboard, CrunchBase, DMOZ, EVliving, GetFreeListing, Google Local, IllumiRate, Jayde, Jigsaw, Librarians’ Internet Index, Little Web Directory, Manta, MerchantCircle, NextMark, Simple Directory, Spoke, SuperPages, Tradevibes, TurnPike, WebBuyersGuide, Web World, Yahoo! Local

Marketing Trends (2): Google Trends, Universe Trends

Name Checks (2): Namechk, Usernamecheck

Post Documents (3): eHow, Google Docs, Scribd

Post Presentations (3): AuthorSTREAM, Myplick, Slideshare

Post Videos (2): Vimeo, YouTube

Press Releases: (4): i-Newswire, PR.com, PressReleasePoint, PRLog.org

Publish Articles (5): ArticleDashboard, Articles FACTORY, Ezinearticles, IdeaMarketers, Yahoo Articles Group

Social Networks (8): Biznik, Crowdvine, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, NowPublic, Plaxo, Viadeo

Twitter Tools (5): Grader, Ping, TweetDeck, TweetLater, Twitter

URL Shorteners (4): bit.ly, doiop, memurl, TinyURL

Wikis (3): Pbwiki, Wetpaint, Wikipedia

Tip: Since PageRank is important to your exposure on the Google search engine results page (SERP), you may want to check out the page rank for each of these services as well. That can be done for free online by using the PageRank Checker (higher = better).

Tip: adding your blog to the directories can improve your search rankings and exposure; the same is true for your web site and your business. That’s the reason for including 35 directory listings (25 free directory listings + 10 blog directories) in the top 100. You only need to do it once, so take advantage of them.

Question: Web 3.0 is to ? as Web 2.0 is to social media…

Your feedback is welcome!

Tags: blog, bookmarks, cheat sheet, free, Google, library, marketing, marketing trends, NextMark, resource, seo, social media, top 100, twitter, wiki
Posted in Helpful Advice, Technology, Weblogs, What's New? | Comments Off

Bernanke or Cutts — Who Holds the Keys?

July 15th, 2009

Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chairman) currently holds the key to influence the supply of money, but Matt Cutts (Google) is teaching us how to get more of it online.

Ben Bernanke

A few of us middle-aged marketers can still remember Black Monday, the stock market crash that occurred shortly after Ronald Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. Many more of us can remember the dot.com boom that occurred a decade later, followed by the Y2K burst in March 2000. Despite the ups and downs of this bipolar economic era, the perceived powers of Alan Greenspan led many to believe he held the keys to recovery and recession.

Not much changed with this perception when Ben Bernanke succeeded Greenspan in February 2006 as the Fed's Chairman. Last year he was ranked the fourth most powerful man in the world by Newsweek. However, President Barack Obama may be positioning Lawrence Summers, Director of the National Economic Council to succeed Bernanke when his term ends in January as the Obama Administration's initiative for change is driving a diversification of power and demand for innovation.

It is obvious from recent failures that changing the federal funds rate to influence the money supply is only one of many options to affect the U.S. economy. However, this is an essential key to managing and stabilizing our economy — and Bernanke holds the keys.

Matt Cutts

Who would have thunk it? The day has come when a software engineer from Google has more business followers than the Fed's Chairman — well, at least those with a web marketing focus. Matt Cutts currently heads up the Webspam team at Google, but he is most recognized for helping marketers improve their PageRank and visibility in search results. Unlike the economics of interest rate decisions, search engine optimization (SEO) is something ever business owner actually has some control over. Here's the catch — it's not easy and it takes time.

Google's PageRank algorithm is complex and its details have not been disclosed. Therefore, many marketers are looking to Matt Cutts for advice on how to improve their PageRank and ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). If your business isn't getting noticed for the right categories online, then you are not prepared for the next generation of marketing. Depending on the level of competition you are dealling with, it could take a very long time to achieve your objectives. SEO experts like David Viney believe that Google will penalize web sites for obtaining too many referring links to quickly, due to the nature of how those inbound links may have been acquired.

With nearly six billion active Google searches in May 2009 alone (according to Nielsen), it is pretty clear that Cutts holds the keys to mastering the free market economy online. If you are a list manager or list owner and have not yet embraced SEO for your business, then you may want to get started now by learning the SEO language from our marketing glossary and putting your mailing list titles on a search engine optimized platform.

Tags: alan greenspan, ben bernanke, Economy, Google, matt cutts, pagerank, seo
Posted in Economy | Comments Off

NextMark Releases 2Q09 Data Card Quality Report

July 9th, 2009

Hanover, NH – July 9, 2009 – NextMark, Inc., a leading provider of direct marketing tools and resources, today published its second quarter 2009 Data Card Quality Report. Among the findings was the first perfect score for a list management company marketing more than 2,000 data card titles with Edith Roman & ePostDirect accomplishing this feat. Millard Group, manages 1,036 data card titles, also posted a near perfect score of 99.9 with a 16 percent increase over the first quarter. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Media Sales, News | Comments Off

Mailing list quality vs. data card quality — what’s the difference?

July 9th, 2009

It's simple. A data card is the marketing document that describes a mailing list.

A quality data card does not guarantee a quality mailing list, but you can have a top quality list that is neglected from a marketing perspective (i.e. a poor quality data card). First impressions count, and the data card is most often the first impression that a broker or mailer receives when researching new test lists for a direct marketing campaign.

To be blunt – you wouldn't serve a T-bone on a trash can lid, would you?

I'm not sure everyone thinks this way when it comes to data cards. The t-bone steak represents a quality mailing list with an exceptional test-to-continuation ratio. The trash can lid represents a neglected data card for that same mailing list. Think about this analogy from the perspective of a list broker or mailer.

You select a mailing list of active subscribers that matches your customer profile. The mailing list is marketed by a credible list manager with industry knowledge, a proven track record for customer service, and a diverse portfolio of quality response list titles. Futhermore, the mailing list you selected is known for its success in delivering above average response rates and lifetime value. You are ready to add this list title to your client's new test recommendation.

Not so fast! You notice that the data card has not been updated in over 6 months. Furthermore, you are ordering a monthly hotline so you have no idea what range the counts will be in.

Needless to say, you're likely to question the validity of the information. You may wonder if the mailing list is still available for rental, or you may find out that the owner of the data card is no longer the list manager because they lost the business to a competitor and never deactivated their version of the data card. That's obviously not something the former list manager would want to promote in the public domain, but it happens.

What's the take-away in all of this? It's simple. Keep your data cards up-to-date with quality information on all of the list research channels, especially in the public domain where your content is most visible.

A ranking of list managers by data card quality is published quarterly.

Tags: data cards, direct mail, list broker, list manager, Mailing Lists, marketing, quality
Posted in Customer Success Stories | Comments Off

NextMark home page as a graph

July 9th, 2009

This is how the HTML DOM Visualizer applet sees NextMark's home page. It's an interesting data visualization and it's got me thinking about other applications.

Tags: data visualization, HTML DOM Visualizer applet, NextMark
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

How to save 63% on your DMA*09 hotel rooms

July 7th, 2009

Thank you, William Shatner. Priceline saved me 63% on my hotel expense at the upcoming DMA*09 conference in San Diego. I got a room at the Omni San Diego for $96/night (versus the special conference rate of $259/night). That's $815 savings for my 5-night stay.

More accurately, thank you to Marty Shaw of Global-Z International for giving me this tip that has saved us thousands of dollars. Marty, I owe you!

DMA*09 is the premier conference of the year for anyone who wants to connect with their customers directly. With this tough economy, it might be hard to justify the cost and I know from experience that hotel rooms are one of the biggest items on the expense report. Here's one way to cut that cost significantly:

Go to priceline.com
click on "name your own price" for hotels
Enter "San Diego, CA USA" as location and your travel dates then click the "Bid Now" button
Choose "Downtown Dan Diego & Harbor Island"
Choose your star level (I chose "4-star deluxe")
Name your price (I bid $96)
Enter your name and hit next
Follow instructions to provide payment information
Cross your fingers and hit the submit button

Please note… You are not guaranteed to get any specific hotel and you can't change or cancel your reservation after you submit your bid. Priceline is not a good option if you need to stay at a certain hotel or need flexibility in your travel arrangements. Priceline won't make any guarantees and I won't either!

That said, I am very happy with my result with the Omni Hotel, which is right across the street from the convention center. I know of two others who have ended up at the Onmi by following this process and another two that ended up at the nearby Westgate Hotel.

I hope this helps you get to the show. If you are there, please stop by NextMark's booth #1930. You can learn how to "reach your market" through new "life changing" technology that finally bridges the gap between data cards and data.

Tags: DMA, DMA*09 conference, Global-Z International, Marty Shaw, NextMark, Omni Hotel, Priceline, Westgate Hotel, William Shatner
Posted in Helpful Advice | Comments Off

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