Jon Silvers

Raconteur, marketer, sometimes pugilist, Jon is an online marketing director at Atlassian. His son is Jonah, his wife is Dana, he lives in Berkeley. 'Nuf said.

Posts

January 07, 07:09 PM
Social media is the new black

Social media marketing is the new black. Everyone is talking about it. Well, ok, it’s mostly consultants trying to get their pitch out. Most of the articles I’ve seen tend to focus on an SEO angle… produce more content, use more keywords, build more in-bound links… and cha-ching. But reducing social media to only a marketing strategy misses the point of social media: it’s a means of communication. You know, dialogue with real human beings.

Let’s say it’s 1889 and a businessman comes to you, the consultant, and says, “I hear about this thing called the telephone. I think it’s going to be big. How can I develop a telephone strategy?” Of course, the telephone isn’t the strategy, it’s a means to an end. It’s a way of having conversations with your audience.

Like the telephone, social media can be abused. Do Not Call lists have sprung up to prevent interruptions at dinner and the general annoyance that comes from script-reading telemarketers. Social media such as blogs and Twitter may be opt-in, but it can be equally annoying to stumble upon contrived sales pitches and SEO keyword stuffed articles. Disingenuous conversations are the ones people leave.

In other words, social media is, above all, about keeping it real.


Posted in Marketing Tagged: conversational marketing, Marketing, seo, social media
December 11, 02:46 PM
Improving email open and click-throughs by purging your email list

Email marketing research has determined that the common subscriber turn-over for an email marketing contact list is 30% annually and 2.5% monthly. — Article Alley

It’s really cool to tell your executive team that you have 25,000 subscribers to your e-newsletter, but what if only 20% of them open the newsletter each month? (A good rate by some standards, but not GREAT) In a list of tens of thousands of email addresses, these obsolete addresses can cost a company thousands of dollars annually in ISP fees. The carbon cost on the servers is probably small — until you add up the cost of all the companies globally that continue to ping dead addresses. And besides, what’s the point of sending email to someone that’s no longer there?

That’s why we just purged our email list of inactive email addresses.

The email that was sent to inactive email addresses

We identified the email addresses that were inactive and then emailed all those people with a final warning that, unless they raised their hand now, we were going to remove them from the list. The “warning” email was a both a courtesy and offered us some protection in case our reporting had culled names of people that were still reading the newsletter. Sure enough, a few people did come forward and even Tweeted about it.

All in all, it was a great exercise and one that we’ll be sure to reproduce every year. Read about the details here.


Posted in Atlassian, Marketing Tagged: email, email marketing
November 30, 02:38 PM
Big Movember Thank You

A huge thank you to everyone that supported me in my Movember quest. I am happy to report that today is my last day of public humiliation — humiliation that netted $365 in donations from friends and family that will be put towards a great cause. I had been leading my Mo-team in donations, but this Thanksgiving holiday was clearly very very good to two of my teammate who out-moed me by raising $423 and $673.35 respectively. I’m happy to have the competition to fight cancer.

Thank you, one and all!


Posted in Philanthropy Tagged: movember
November 03, 12:54 PM
Movember

What’s Movember? Movember is an annual, month-long “celebration” (their words, not mine!) of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues — specifically prostate and testicular cancer. I had never heard of Movember until I started working for an Australian-headquartered company where I’ve watched as my male colleagues have grown ‘staches for the last four years. This year, I’m going to join them… much to the consternation of my wife who would like nothing less than to see fur beneath my schnoz.

This is a really tough year to give to charity — and there are lots of charities asking for our help — but if you have $5 or $10 that you can donate, I would really appreciate it. My donation page is here. Thanks for your help! And come back in 25+ days to see my ‘stache!


Posted in Random
August 10, 01:38 PM
Spam gets relevant

Going through email at work this morning and saw that a relevant, decent comment came through on a blog post from last year. I was about to respond to the comment when I noticed the funny (not haha funny) name of the commenter.

How did a spam bot write a relevant comment? This must be a copycat spam bot. Smart, but not that smart.

copycat spam bot


Posted in Random
June 23, 07:43 PM
Anatomy of an agile campaign

Back in another day and time, I wrote a blog post about transparency in marketing. This post today is about authenticity, and how Atlassian created a campaign that focuses on the user experience rather than the marketing message.

One of the several announcements Atlassian made at its first ever worldwide user conference was the launch of a new minisite, Agile @ Atlassian. While we were not Agile subject-matter experts, we could provide some important insights into our own understanding of Agile. That’s an important distinction, because it guided our decision on how to produce a campaign. There’s an excellent TED talk by Joseph Pine on creating an authentic voice in marketing. Our campaign was based on creating this type of authentic talk based on our experiences rather than on marketing messages.

A site is born.

Atlassian’s developers have been doing agile for 7 years, and many of our customers do as well using our developer tools. “Agile” in this context relates to how software developers engineer products. The Agile Manifesto and hundreds (thousands?) of agile evangelists are spreading the gospel that there’s an “enlightened” way to code.

Many people don’t know how to take advantage of Atlassian tools for agile software development. In fact, there’s a whole lot of agile developers that are searching for better ways and tools to make their team agile. Atlassian’s software was engineered more broadly to be used by any type of development, but they can be used for agile software development, and the mini-site provided a glimpse into how we take advantage of our own tools for agile.

Thus, Agile @ Atlassian was born. The campaign breaks down as follows:

  • We spent a grand total of $1000 on the campaign and minisite — the money was spent on a professional videographer to tape our developers talking about how they do their jobs.
  • The mini-site was designed and produced by our in-house design and web teams. The videos were edited and pimped out by an endlessly talented and creative developer on the marketing team.
  • We included previously recorded customer webinars with S1 Corp and Replicate Tech that discuss how customers user our products for agile.
  • Atlassian developers have been blogging about agile@atlassian, and an RSS feed of their blogs is included on the mini-site.
  • New product descriptions were written to emphasize how our products can be used in an agile environment.
  • To tie up all the loose pieces — videos, blogs, webinars — we design a brand for the agile@atlassian series that appears in the the blogs and anywhere agile is found on our website.
  • We used the campaign as a platform to announce our latest agile project management offering, GreenHopper.

One Twitterer wrote:

“Listening to agile@Atlassian while working. I’m a huge Atlassian fan and this is a nice peak into their world.“

Since launching, the minisite has seen over 6,000 visits, with the average person viewing 5.63 pages on the site/visit. This is a short recap of the effort we put into the site, and I think it’s a very good template for other B2B marketers for creating similar campaigns, esp. those who dare to go from a marketing voice to an authentic one.


Posted in Atlassian, Marketing Tagged: marketing campaign, minisite, website marketing
April 29, 03:41 PM
Making a good newsletter even better

We recently went through a redesign of the Atlassian newsletter. The newseltter, we decided, had become long in the tooth, it was time for a refresh. I’ve read up on Newsletter design at MarketingSherpa and other sites, and our team had a pretty good idea for how we wanted to see it evolve.

But before taking the plunge, we wanted feedback from our subscribers. What do they think about it? Are we the only ones bored with the design, or are others hoping for a change? Can the content be improved, and if so, how?

Over 100 people responded to our survey that went to newsletter and blog subscribers. Here’s one of my favorite replies:

Generally, I regard the Atlassian newsletter as one of the best produced by any company. A good blend of company news, products news and things of general interest.

Wow! Others concurred.

Only that it is about the best I have ever seen in ANY company – (x30 or more I have seen). Also that it has jumped and improved a lot more in the last 5 months, from my outward perspective. You guys are rockin’ it! But you know that. Keep it up!

Nice clean, feature rich, informative and well organized.

It is great. In general I think Atlassian is my favorite design/structure of all my various newsletters. I also really like the random links at the end, usually I find 1 or 2 really useful links.

It wasn’t all rosy — there was a good deal of constructive feedback too. We’ve posted more comments and displayed the before/after design on the Atlassian Blog. Curious readers can subscribe to the Atlassian newsletter here. Our next steps are to monitor clicks and open rates to see if that improves over time.

If you’ve re-designed your newsletter lately, please let me know, I’m very curious to see more examples and learned how others have done it.


Posted in Atlassian, Marketing
April 20, 03:49 PM
Atlassian Stimulus Package for small business

Love the pig!

This week only, Atlassian, the company I work for, has a special offer for JIRA and Confluence. For just $5 each, you get 5-user licenses of the products, including technical support. It’s the same deal that the big guys get, but tailored for small teams and small business. My favorite bit: all the money raised goes to Room to Read, a charity that helps children in developing countries get schools and libraries.

There have been many fantastic Twitters so far about the offer:

An amazing $5 deal on Jira and Confluence from Atlassian for small orgs, I use these fantastic products every day… http://tr.im/j4nA

- scottmanley

@tarasis atlassian have personal licenses available too, which didn’t work for my needs, but the $5 plan definitely hits the sweet spot

- janeylicious

Oh, nice. Atlassian is donating proceeds for its starter license of JIRA and Confluence ($5/ea) to charity. http://snurl.com/gb7ys

- ITSinsider

Check out the offer… and hurry, because the sale ends on Friday this week!


Posted in Atlassian Tagged: Atlassian, confluence, jira, sale
February 24, 02:43 PM
Conversational before there was “Conversational Marketing”

It kind of goes without saying that the reason Atlassian has hit $100 million in cumulative all-time revenue is because of the products. But as one of the employees charged with the task of marketing these great products, I tend to think about the other side of the equation: the word of mouth that Atlassian has generated that helped us reach this milestone. As it turns out, JIRA not only served as a great product for customers, but as the key ingredient for word of mouth marketing.

Some perspective

I’ve attended the last two CM Summits in San Francisco. For a marketer, they’re great events. The conference focuses on the changing of the guard: leaving the old school marketing techniques like direct mail, big company PR, and 1-way communication, and turning instead towards creating open dialogues with customers, creating fan sites, and generally keeping it real.

In other words: it’s not about marketing anymore, it’s about creating conversations.

Enter the JIRA

In 2003, before Facebook and other social network sites captured our collective imaginations, Atlassian built a website that allows anyone — customers, prospects, partners, journalists, etc. — to submit product bugs, feature requests, and other issues, which are visible to the entire community.

In our lingo, it’s called JIRA. Nothing was (or is) censored. While most other B2B enterprise software companies in the world spent energy obfuscating problems with their products or services, Atlassian listened to it’s customers, built a loyal fan base, won over thousands of customers, and beat most of the big-name venture capital-backed Silicon Valley companies (in fact, most of them are customers now!).

And to be clear… JIRA is a product, not a marketing tool. And yet, it has been a platform for thousands of conversations in the last 6-7 years.

One of the things I’ve learned on the job is the power of listening, and responding, and building trust (as opposed to the old school marketing of just ‘spinning’). The folks at the CM Summits call it ‘marketing’ but Atlassian has called it ‘just doing good business.’ JIRA has given us an incredible feedback loop, it’s allowed developers to speak directly with customers (as opposed to the typical situation where developers are locked in the basement* while the marketing types filter conversations to them), and in turn it’s fostered trust between customer and company, something that other companies have pushed aside in the name of an obfuscating public relations strategy.

Of course, this is in hindsight.

When JIRA was first being used, it was also a dog food mentality. As a product JIRA has improved immensely under seven years of heavy use, from novice and seasoned users alike. No one ever thought of it as marketing, it was (and still is!) an issue tracker.

Being transparent and open makes you vulnerable, too: there are lot of feature requests, suggestions, gripes, etc., that have not been closed out. Mike wrote about a rather infamous issue some time ago. But that’s the conversational marketing dilemma: criticism is part of being open, it’s part of winning the trust of your customers.

On the whole, JIRA has been of incredible service to the company. As Laura wrote the other day, Atlassian is surpassing $100 million cumulative sales revenue in just seven years. I have to think that that figure isn’t just based on JIRA sales, but also JIRA transparency and lots and lots of conversations.

Links:

* Um, figuratively of course!
Posted in Atlassian, Marketing Tagged: conversational marketing, customer centric, dogfooding, eating your own dog food, jira, Marketing, Technology, wom, word-of-mouth
February 03, 04:57 PM
When ads go bad

Button, Button

There was a Twilight Zone episode called Button, Button where a stranger gave a man, Arthur, an empty box with a button on it. The stranger explained that if Arthur clicks the button, someone somewhere in the world would die… and Arthur would be paid $200k.

  • What are the odds that Arthur would be picked?
  • What if you cannot determine who died or was hurt as a result?
  • What if the offer seemed irristable?

I’m going to stretch the analogy for Linkstar, the company behind what I call link spam.

  • A representative from some company (presumably Linkstar, but I’ll never know) contacted me with an offer to sponsor my blog.
  • In exchange for a small sum of money (much less than $200k!)
  • I would have to put ads on my site that build link quality for viagra and vitamin spam sites.

Unlike poor Arthur, I didn’t take the deal. However, had I been offered $200k….

An investigative reporter, Dan Tynan, contacted me because he was writing an article about Linkstar. I’m impressed at what he’s learned.

As far as I’ve been able to determine, Linkstar isn’t doing anything illegal or particularly shady. But its penchant for secrecy is troubling. As a general rule, I don’t do business with any online company that does not clearly identify its principals or provide its actual place of business – and I don’t think other people should, either.

Can running the wrong kinds of ads on your blog or Web site hurt you? Absolutely.

Read Tynan’s two-part series here:

Part I: The curious case of Linkstar Media

Part II: Bloggers beware: Bad ads can come back to bite you


Posted in Random Tagged: advertising, google, investigation, link spam, linkstar, seo, spam, twilight zone, viagra
Blog Bites Man

Posts

May 25, 01:55 PM
Freemium is Dead.... Long Live Causium
Just Imagine.... What if every time a consumer downloaded a free online application they made a micro donation to charity. Consider the impact a company can have to help causes like micro-finance, cancer research or global literacy. Naysayers will shout that consumers would never pay and that companies wouldn't profit... We disagree. Win-Cubed Over the past year, we pioneered a new customer acquisition strategy called Causium that merges Cause Marketing with the popular Freemium business model.  Instead of simply giving away a teaser product, we charge a micro-payment of $10 for its 10 user "Starter":http://www.atlassian.com/starter licenses and then donate all proceeds to charity.  The results have been an astounding win-win-win for all parties.  Over 16,000 customers now have software that they couldn't previously afford, "Atlassian":http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ has earned over $2.5M in upsell revenue and our selected charity, "Room to Read":http://www.roomtoread.org/, has received over $500,000 for literacy programs in developing nations. Freemium on Steroids Causium thrives by creating psychological incentives and psychic needs of all parties. Customers love getting a deal and equate more value to goods they pay for than for something that is free. They are proud of their contribution to making the world a better place and have tweeted by the hundreds to let their friends know. From the start, the approach maximizes what Robert Cialdini calls " likability.":http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274804739&sr=8-1 The whole donation experience creates a mental note: "Let's buy software from Atlassian when the need arises." For Atlassian, the ability to do something generous while on the clock has invigorated employees and inspired substantial innovation. We were thrilled to work towards our initial goal of donating $25,000 to Room to Read and are ecstatic that the stakes are so much higher. For Atlassian, the results of the Causium model have been a strong employee loyalty tool and helped the company attract over 50 new employees in the past year. Cause Marketing Counts Most For continued skeptics of the value of Causium, just listen to our friend "John Wood":http://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Microsoft-Change-World-Entrepreneurs/dp/B0018SYY2I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274805035&sr=1-1, the founder of Room to Read. John gave up his promising career at Microsoft to follow his belief that world change starts through education. With a tiny overhead ratio, Room to Read funnels contributions straight into literacy programs in places like Cambodia. Watch John talk about the impact that Causium has imparted on Room to Read: Hopefully hearing about these results will inspire others to adopt Causium too. Let us know your scenarios and how to dial in the model for your needs.
May 05, 02:51 PM
Five ways to Build Wildly Successful Pricing Pages

**1) Make it public** Making your pricing public is the critical first step because customers want it! Using Google Analytics, we study traffic patterns and popularity of every page on our web site. The percent of visitors who actually visit "Atlassian's pricing pages":http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing.jsp so shockingly high that if you don't disclose your pricing, you should at least put it up as an A/B test to check the impact on your visitors. When you put yourself in the prospect's shoes, they are all asking the qualifying question 'is this affordable enough so that I should spend time learning more?' The worst possible scenario is having a likely prospect stop learning about your product simply because they thought they couldn't afford it. Making your pricing public engages the right customers with the least amount of effort. **2) Create an incontrovertible offer** Pricing tables provide a platform for marketers to get across their key messages. One key message we wanted to share at Atlassian is that JIRA is accessible to even the smallest development team. To accomplish this, we created the "Starter License":http://www.atlassian.com/starter/ concept to get small team's going for only $10. To sweeten the offer and make it incontrovertible, we set it up so that all proceeds from the campaign go to charity. The approach has added nearly $500,000 in charitable donations to Room to Read and thousands of new customers for Atlassian. **3) Apply the 3 second rule** This great rule for judging when the edibility of food that's fallen on the ground, also helps for designing pricing tables. Any head-scratching and you can lose your visitor. We have tracked average time on site across multiple iterations of the Atlassian website. Regardless of how we orient the content, the average customer's time commitment to our content stays the same. In this context, the clock is ticking and it is way more advantageous for you to have the visitor learning about your product instead of the intricacies of your pricing. Always aim to get visitors in and out of this page with the smallest tax to their brains. **4) Elegantly hide the 20%** To meet the three second rule, secondary navigation elements are critical. These navigation elements remove the clutter from your pricing table to impact the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time. The screenshot below shows how we have used tabs to break apart the price list categories and a toggle between hosted pricing options. In the end, 80% of folks get exactly what they need in 3 seconds while the remaining 20% can get what they want in just a few seconds more. **5) Make them sexy** Design is a critical element of pricing tables. Spending extra time twelve different iterations and reviewing every pixel on your border width is money well spent. It is easy to just throw something up on your website and work onto the 'real' content of defining your features. The usage stats from Atlassian.com prove that pricing pages are equally as important as product content. With the high visit rates of our pricing we rebuilt the JIRA web property with the expectations that the pricing page was the most critical page on the whole property. The dollar participation stats from "Google Analytics":http://www.google.com/analytics/ have confirmed this is money well spent. Do our pricing pages actually meet the design goals I've mentioned. Let us know your thoughts.

March 09, 08:00 PM
Three Ways to Get Started with Cause Marketing

**A Triumph in Cause Marketing** Over the past year, Atlassian has led one of the most successful cause marketing campaigns imaginable with the Atlassian Stimulus Package and follow-on "starter":http://atlassian.com/starter license efforts. In less than 9 months, we have raised over $500,000 for a groundbreaking non-profit, "Room To Read":http://www.roomtoread.org and added over 12,000 new customers. The net result has been a big boost for Atlassian's market share, competitive position, up-sell revenue and corporate brand. These efforts have also providing a huge morale boost as employees are proud to work for a responsible company. What's most surprising is that this was our first attempt at Cause Marketing. If you are curious on how we've been able to achieve this succession our first try, here are three ways you can get started with Cause Marketing. **1) Start with Your Values:** The first step is set up your back-bone and define what matters most. If helping out social causes really matters to you, then take the first step to let it be known in your company's mission statement and values. Put your money where your mouth is and state it as part of your company identity. Atlassian's "values":http://www.atlassian.com/about/values.jsp have been drafted in a way that makes Cause Marketing come natural. One of our five values is to "Build with balance and heart". In being balanced and listening to our hearts, our founders set up a program to donate 1% of all revenue and employee hours to the Atlassian Foundation. Because this value is clearly established, the generosity required for Cause Marketing comes natural. **2) Pick Your Causes:** Even before you have a marketing campaign in mind, have your company listen to it's heart. If you have a team collaboration product like our "Confluence":http://atlassian.com/software/confluence wiki, you can engage in a company wide conversation around local or global causes that people want to contribute to. For Atlassian, selecting 'Room to Read' as the recipient for the proceeds of our "Atlassian Stimulus Package":http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/04/5_days_x_thousa.html because our founders had already done their research and had already donated to them. You never know when your next great marketing idea will arise, so why not be prepared with a Cause Marketing beneficiary in mind. **3) Start Giving Today** Giving is infectious, so when folks in your organization see that corporate giving is condoned and recognized, they will become your greatest source of Cause Marketing ideas. Even when Atlassian was too small to have profits to donate, the founders started with the idea that community organizations who don't have an IT budget shouldn't have to pay. That one small decision has blossomed to the point where Atlassian has given away over 5,000 free "community licenses":http://www.atlassian.com/about/community.jsp to non-profits and Open Source projects. Your inspiration to begin with even the smallest gifts can have the same impact. By following the fundamentals of these three ideas, your foundation is set for executing a hyper-successful cause marketing campaign like the Atlassian Stimulus Package. What are your suggestions on building a solid Cause Marketing campaign?

March 04, 04:30 PM
Five Reasons Your Products Need Quarterly Health Checks

**Just what the Doctor Ordered** A year ago, our product marketing team started creating Health Checks for each of our products. The review would include a reading on each product's vital signs including; sales data, competitive landscape, challenges and opportunities. As product marketing was still a new discipline at Atlassian, our first intention was to show that the marketing team had a commanding knowledge of market trends and each product's performance. What started out as a credibility building experiment for one team has turned into a standard practice that involves nearly the whole company. Here are five reasons you should adopt health checks too. **1) Address Problems Early:** Health Checks have given us the ability to see the basics with a fresh set of eyes. While we look at sales performance data weekly, we don't always capture the trends. When we examined "JIRA":http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ sales data about a year back we spotted a slight softening that we didn't want to persist. We responded with a surge of marketing activities like the "Atlassian Stimulus Package":http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/04/5_days_x_thousa.html and "Cash for Clunkers":http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/09/cash-for-clunkers-jira-4-trade-ins.html that kept momentum going until the new release of "JIRA 4.0":http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/whats-new.jsp has taken the market by storm. Now, we are back to hyper growth rates as we addressed our problems early on. **2) Discover the Undiscoverable:** Most product marketers have a love - hate relationship with Health Checks. We HATE the data collection and pedantic efforts to tighten all of the data into a single slide deck. The mental exercise to assimilate all of the data is both fatiguing and time consuming. Meanwhile, we LOVE the understanding we get from uncovering a big pile of stones. Tangible example of opportunities unearthed in Health Check sleuthing include: spotting growth opportunities across different regions, determining the differences in sales cycles across the portfolio and understanding the sales demographic we used to build up our "Starter":http://www.atlassian.com/starter/ license campaign. **3) Build Accountability:** We have set the expectation that Health Checks are also intended to drive action. In our mind, even the most thorough presentation should open up as many questions as it resolves. So we consider it a success that after dozens of hours of preparation, we still walk away with a pile of new action items. The extra work provides a great opportunity for accountability and now we start each Health Check with a review of how we have accomplished action items from last quarter. Our follow-through has created a great accountability mechanism for the company as a whole. **4) Connect to Your Developers to the Market:** Initially, we started presenting all of the findings to the management team as they were the most eager to consume the info. After our second round of health checks, one of our "founders":http://blogs.atlassian.com/rebelutionary/ suggested that we also deliver the presentations to our developers so that they get the same wake up call. Doing so is a big commitment as our 100 developers can churn out a lot of code in the 30 minutes we devote to the Health Checks each quarter. The results have been positive though as it has made developers more aware of how their core work and "20 percent time":http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/2008/03/20_time_experiment.html projects can impact tangible business problems. **5) Engage Your Company:** Other teams at Atlassian have begun to embrace the Health Check concept. Both our sales and technical support teams have begun automating quarterly reports that they can include in the Health Checks. The result is a more unified view on the health of each of our products. Finally, good, bad or ugly our health check presentations and findings are always published publicly to the whole company inside of our "Confluence":http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ wiki. This transparency engages every Atlassian to be involved in collective opportunities and challenges. I'm curious about your perspective about the successes and failures of Health Checks. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

February 22, 03:05 PM
Email marketing 2.0
Remember email? That word that used to be spelled "E-Mail" as if to clearly and unequivocally underscore that it's different from "Mail." It was spelled that way until it became so ubiquitous, so ingrained in our way of life that we felt at ease to drop the "-" and capitalization. In the last couple years, the mantra of "social media" has began to take hold, and our old friend, email, has been denigrated and demoted. I've seen it slammed by social media evangelists as "1.0," "disruptive," and "cumbersome." To be sure, in some contexts email is all of these things. It is an old Internet technology, it can splinter our concentration as we alt-tab back and forth from app to app, and it utterly FAILS when used as a collaboration tool (you try keeping up with a conversation that's 6 threads deep!). Google Wave was hailed as a replacement to email. Apparently, all things social media are good, and all things email are bad. Well... It's different in practice. Email is brilliant when used for the right kinds of communication. Stick with me on this; as the real-world example below illustrates, if you proactively reach out to the right customers, at the right time, with the right message, email can push your results off the charts over and above social media. I know, utter heresy! Some background first: Atlassian has embarked on a mission to modernize our email marketing system. We send a lot of emails already — nearly half-a-million emails per year! — for all types of things:
  • When customers evaluate our products
  • For new product announcements
  • Event (e.g., Atlassian user groups in your area) and special promotional announcements
  • A monthly newsletter that has been going for nearly four years
  • All sorts of "transactional" email such as purchase confirmations and renewal reminders
  • Etc.
We set a goal to consolidate and better track the results of our emails. To achieve this, we needed a system that could not only handle simple campaigns like sending newsletters, but one that could also manage "drip feed" campaigns — the automated kind you get when you register or sign up to try a product. Ultimately, our goal for a new email system is to make our emails as lustworthy as our products by being relevant. We looked at 25 — truly — different email systems, from the one we had been using (CampaignMonitor: a great tool for sending newsletters) to complete lead generation management systems (like Eloqua: an BIG system for lead scoring, email, web metrics and more) and ultimately settled on something in-between (ExactTarget). (Our list of criteria and reasons for choosing ExactTarget are fodder for another blog post.) Email 1, Social Media 0 While we are mid-way through a phased rollout that will eventually incorporate all the emails mentioned in the bullet points above, we have scored some early victories. We recently announced JIRA 4, a new version of our flagship product, and new $10 Starter licenses. In the case of the Starter licenses, we emailed nearly 30,000 people to let them know about the new license type. To make the emails relevant, we split the list into about 5 different segments based on the individuals' product profile and sent each segment a customized message. But before I get to results, it's important to have some context on the launch of the new Starter licenses.
  • We announced the Starter licenses on our blogs and on our website home page
  • Dozens of Atlassian employees Twittered about the new Starter licenses
  • The beneficiary of the sale of Starter licenses -- Room to Read -- issued a press release
  • We had briefed some journalists prior to the launch
In other words, we made a big fuss about the new licenses. Given the so-called "power of social media," why, oh why, would we use a "1.0" application to spread the news? I submit to into evidence a chart that displays the total number of orders of the new Starter licenses per day.

Email blew the socks off the campaign. Even with thousands of subscribers to our blogs, even with thousands of followers on our corporate and personal Twitter feeds, email took the message to the masses. "We still love you, social media" I don't want to discount the power of social media. In fact, we included a very prominent footer in our email template (the image to the right of this paragraph) that encouraged recipients to Twitter about the sale. Due to a dearth of good Twitter analytics, we don't have good metrics on the Twitter effect but from just watching my RSS filters, it's clear that the email helped to encourage hundreds, if not thousands, of people to spread the message even more. Moreover, social media has a shelf life. Social media provides a long tail effect that keeps the news alive longer and could potentially expose the news to a much bigger demographic. For that reason, we still love you, social media. I would love to know how your marketing mix is changing. Are you "still" using email? Or have you completely switched over to social media campaigns?
February 09, 09:40 PM
A Confederacy of Phreaks

Not (just) another marketing blog



There are dozens of great marketing blogs - many we subscribe religiously to (the OPML file), and learn a great deal from - but we found that most just peered deep into only a single aspect of B2B marketing, so we jumped at an angle. Our goal for this blog is to share how an integrated, full-service B2B marketing team cranks out some pretty tasty sausage (we think it's tasty, anyway). Sure, we'll go deep on certain stuff - web analytics, SEO, design and copy-editing tips - but we'll try to approach each topic from the angle of what we do as a team, and not only the individual balls we're kicking down field.


How we work, and who we are
Our marketing group is organized into five distinct teams - Audience & Community, Product Marketing, Demand Generation, Interactive (affectionately known as WTF for Website TaskForce, or for what they mutter under their breath whenever anyone requests a change), and Imagineering (or marketing engineering). There are 14 of us in total. For a time, we used superheros to help explain to the rest of the company the focus of each individual team, and it's hopefully still a useful metaphor:


Audience & Community ("A&C"): this team leads our community and customer marketing efforts, PR, events and email marketing. I partly chose Professor Xavier because Jon, who leads the team, bears a striking resemblance, but also because Professor X was basically responsible for promoting mutants and mutant rights, and that's what A&C does for our customers, and for our overall brand. With 15,000 customers, this team has a big community to organize, and a treasure-trove of great stories to share with the world. Jon and his team will blog about our social media strategies, our event marketing tactics and plans, how we use and measure video, and of course ideas around community building and engagement.


Product Marketing ("PMMs"): product marketing does exactly that. They focus on messaging and positioning; drive our product launches; handcraft most of our copy; evangelise our products externally to media, analysts, customers and evaluators; man the front-lines on blog and social media conversations; and work closely with product management to build-the-box for future versions. The Archer's superpower was precision, and the best product marketing teams nail this. Daniel and his team will share ideas on our product launch approaches; how we engage customers, evaluators and naysayers online; and how his team works with other groups on messaging and product planning.


Demand Generation ("Demand Gen"): Demand Gen is marketing's central nervous system, and it functions to connect the activity of other teams around increasing the size and effectiveness of our funnel. The group owns all aspects of online marketing (SEO, advertising, landing pages), campaigns and creative for generating more leads, and reporting on the effectiveness of our tactics and approaches. The Riddler is a useful metaphor because much of what marketing does is a riddle, and some times very difficult to measure. Ben and his team will blog about our online marketing strategies, SEO and PPC techniques, our approach to reporting and analysis, and some of the more inventive ideas we've had to get more eyeballs and more customers.


Interactive ("WTF"): Interactive manages all things "Web," including design, A/B testing, production and measurement (we use Google Analytics and ClickDensity). The web for us is the tool that matters most in reading our market and convincing them to try our products, and this team is thinking constantly how to make our site smarter and better. Beyond his retractable adamantium claws, let's face it, Wolverine's real superpower is his sex appeal, and for us, on the web, that matters. Sure, we need to be clear and authentic and smart, but we also need to be sexy. Marketers, sometimes embarrassingly to the rest of us, refer to this as "making it pop." Justen and his team will dive into the innards of our Google Analytics and cookie configuration, share thoughts on our design and web production processes, and talk about different ways we're trying to make our website work better.


Imagineering: every marketing department should have a developer on the team, especially if they're focused on marketing automation and self-service sales. Imagineering for us is many things, all of them intensely creative - demos, videos and screencasts that in 90 seconds capture the essence of a multi-dimensional product, evangelism and public-speaking, prototyping and creating tools or techniques that convince more people evaluating our software to take the plunge and buy a copy. The GreenLantern could summon anything he could think of through a magic ring on his finger, and Mark has that same ability (sans the ring). Mark will blog about being a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing (a developer on a marketing team), his techniques with video and screencasts, and tools he's created to help evaluators understand our products better during their evals.


Keeping it Real
So that's us, a rag-tag band of misfits, a confederacy of phreaks. If you're a marketer, curious about marketing, love to make fun of marketing, want to learn tips and tricks on anything from how we use Screenflow to what stuff we put in our HTTP cookie, enjoy hearing about how one team at one company tries to make it happen, or you just don't have anything better to do, read on - there might be something here for you.

June 25, 10:00 AM
(Marketing) 7 lessons learned in publishing video to our website

More than a year ago, we launched AtlassianTV, a section on our website dedicated to videos about products, customers, plugins, partners, and all-things Atlassian. When we first launched the site, it was a barely structured, small group of videos. Since then, the site has become more sophisticated, the number of videos grows weekly, and the audience has grown at a nice click. Graphs that go up and to the right are usually a good thing. That's the result, but of course there were some mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. Herewith are a few key takeaways: 1. Think about your audience first 2. Determine how you're going to measure success early on 3. YouTube is awesome, but is it the right tool for what you need to accomplish? 4. Get into a rhythm 5. Have fun 6. Even B2B companies can use ads 7. Got content? It should be organized

1. Think about your audience first No one likes to spend an hour of their time on a webinar being sold to. And yet, 98% of the webinars I've seen from companies do just that. Sell, sell, sell. It feels a little demeaning to me to have someone walk through a standard sales process, when what I really want from a webinar is facts, not a slick pitch. This is especially true among software developers and IT. So we set out to inform and educate rather than sell. For one thing, we made an assumption that the bulk of the viewers were our own customers, not people we want to sell to, but rather, people that are looking for new and innovative ways to use our products. We began producing "Voice of the Customer" and "Plugin of the Month" webinars to give people insights into different aspects of our products. After ironing out the kinks of producing videos via GotoWebinar and then publishing them for on-demand viewing with Episodic, we began to offer live webinars about the latest product releases to give customers an overview of the new features and to ask questions. Over time, we've created a rich assortment of video content. 2. Determine how you're going to measure success early on One thing we failed to do when the site was first launch was establish good success metrics. We couldn't, for example, determine what percent of video people were watching. Were they dropping off halfway? We could measure page views via our website analytics, but we knew very little about the video itself. That made it hard early on to prove our success with video. There are many video sharing services to choose from. We picked a new one called Episodic. Episodic is chock full of features, but one of the top features for us was analytics. With Episodic, we get pretty charts, rock solid data on views and video popularity, and the ability to compare metrics. In addition to validating the use of video on the website, we've learned things like...
  • There have been over 133,200 views of AtlassianTV video in the last 10 months
  • Many live webinars may only attract 50 viewers, but within a week, that number has multiplied by a factor of 10 for the on-demand version
  • That people like to download the video. Our videos have been downloaded more than 2,500 times since we started offering a downloadable version of the video
  • The top 3 referring sites for video are GreenPepper Software (makers of GreenHopper, which we recently acquired), Balsamiq, and ReadWriteWeb

3. Syndicate (aka Leverage YouTube). Aside from analytics, why not use YouTube? Actually, we are. And there's a lot of good reasons to use YouTube that probably don't need to be expounded on. Episodic has a nice little feature built in to use TubeMogul for syndicating AtlassianTV content automatically to YouTube. YouTube gives us far-reaching distribution and helps us find new audiences through associated content and communities. Episodic gives us tighter control of our content, better content management, analytics and higher video resolution quality and formats. If/When we find the time, we'll be spicing up our YouTube channel. 4. Get into a rhythm When you first embark on creating a video channel, you have lots of ideas for the kinds of video to publish on your website. But it requires a lot more than just ideas. It required commitment on our part to see it through. One thing Jay emphasized when he started working here was cadence, setting a regular rhythm of video production. Cadence did two things. It created expectations among the team here that twice a month, they would produce a video. It also created an expectation from the audience. They will come to understand that there is a regular schedule and that they should keep coming back to see what's in the hopper. Almost a year later, we don't think much about creating a new video. Like writing blogs, filling out JIRA tickets, and editing the wiki, it's just part of what we do. 5. Have fun When it comes to producing videos, I'm pretty much a straight shooter: create the video and publish it. Fortunately, there are a lot of creative and talented types working here that have taken our video to the next level with sweet graphics and animation. Rather than a laundry list of new features, Mark has edited little masterpieces, like the series of Confluence videos that borrow themes from the tv series, 24. Everything is done in-house using Screenflow, and Mark wrote a 3-part series on how to create videos like this in Screenflow. It's fun and distinct, and hopefully keeps viewers interested. You know you're not going to see the same thing on other company websites. 6. Even B2B companies can use ads Ads are ubiquitous in online consumer videos. You know you're going to get an ad before that movie preview. Advertising is useful for B2B companies. In fact, it's a lot more targeted compared with many of the consumer sites I've visited. We ran a short (13-seconds) animated ad to promote our upcoming user conference, Atlassian Summit. Episodic allowed us to easily insert the ad into the AtlassianTV template, refreshing all the video on AtlassianTV with the ad at the click of a button. After the conference, we were able to delete the segment from the template, republish, and return hundreds of videos back to normal. That type of control over our content is awesome! To do that in YouTube would have required re-editing every video in FinalCut or another non-linear editor, re-encoding them, and re-publishing them. If you think you may want to include ads in your video, find a system earlier rather than later that will support this feature. 7. Got content? It should be organized. Our most recent update to AtlassianTV has focused on content discovery and search, helping users discover associated videos by how they're tagged. We took some cues from consumer video sites like Hulu and ESPN on how they organized content, and associated similar content together, and we're iterating on the design over the next couple months. But for now, we've improved the functionality so users can browse by product (Confluence, JIRA, FishEye) and by content type (demo, webinar, customer testimonial). It's been a great journey so far, and we've learned a ton. Video is fun but time-consuming. But if it's true what they say - a picture paints a thousands words - Atlassian TV says volumes.
May 14, 09:44 PM
Inside Atlassian: 7 answers about Twitter for business

Jeremiah Owyang raised some interesting thoughts over at his blog about 7 Questions Some Brands Are Asking About Twitter . To my great surprise we haven't had anyone talk on the news blog about how we're using twitter at Atlassian, so I thought I would give Jeremiah's questions a crack and hopefully provide an insight into how businesses can use twitter based on our use case.

1. Should we create multiple accounts for different divisions? How should we name them? How should the content be different?
We naturally ended up with multiple twitter accounts at Atlassian, and that's just the way we like it. If everything was coming through one account our followers would be bombarded with tweets that weren't relevant to them. @atlassian is our general company account. It is used to send out tweets about our blogs and products. We use to answer any questions directed at that account, also to give updates on conferences that we are attending. Anyone from the company can issue tweets from this account as the login and password are freely available on our internal Confluence extranet. However most people prefer to use their personal twitter accounts when dealing with customers. Our golden rule of thumb is that the corporate account is not a person, and therefore shouldn't be expected to behave like a personal account. It's run by the marketing team, and we're up front about that on our twitter bio. @atlassiansummit, @jirastudio and @cloverallover are accounts that are used for more specific sections of our customers. We're pretty sure that most of our followers don't want to know when JIRA Studio is scheduled for maintenance, unless they are Studio customers. Likewise we try to keep Kitty the emailbot's alcoholic tweets away from our general followers. It is also worth mentioning that a lot of Atlassians are running their own individual accounts, including our Fearless Leader and CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes (@mcannonbrookes).
2. Is it ok to just tweet out news on our main corporate account? Or should we be conversational?
This depends on the individual company, for us the answer is no. If a customer or a potential customer called you up on the telephone and asked you a question would you hang up on them? I'm guessing not, you would direct them to the correct department and try and help them out. When we first started using the @atlassian account we did a lot more broadcast type announcements feeding through information from our blogs and press releases. We find we are more conversational now as more people join twitter and see the @atlassian account as another avenue for customer service and interaction.
3. How do we get our corporate reps (sales, product teams) to use this tool, and be conversational?
Our community and media advocate Laura sent out a request to staff over our internal blog encouraging staff to sign up. Twitter use has naturally grown from there as staff have added their own accounts as a way of dealing directly with customers. Because there were so many interesting conversations happening people naturally wanted to be involved. It didn't take a lot of convincing to our sales and support guys that twitter is just another avenue to talk about Atlassian to our customers. Every department now has individuals on twitter - tech writers, product managers, developers, support heroes, design guys, technical sales, and naturally the marketeers.
4. Should we follow folks? If so, what's the protocol? Should we only follow folks that follow us? We don't want to appear like 'big brother'
We use @atlassian to follow people who follow us, we manually follow back to make sure we aren't just following spammers. However we do not actively seek out people to follow from the @atlassian account. At this stage there is more likelihood that individuals will actively follow customers, contacts or naysayers depending on their personal area of interest. We're still working out how to monitor and not be too over eager and 'overtwitter' from personal accounts to customers.
5. What are the tools to use to manage multiple authors/tweeters?
Seesmic Desktop seems to be the choice at the moment with the Atlassian twits for multiple accounts.
6. How can we find other examples of B2B twitter examples?
You're looking at a detailed one right now.
7. How should we brand our Twitter backgrounds images?
Our main accounts are aligned with company branding and like all our eye candy are designed by our fantastic inhouse designer - Jason. For example the @atlassiansummit background lines up with the Atlassian Summit website and all our marketing collateral around that. We have also been known to change out our twitter backgrounds if we're running a special campaign that we want to promote - for Earth Hour earlier this year we pimped out a new twitter background.

September 22, 06:59 AM
School of Shaolin: Blogging at Atlassian
Master Po: [after easily defeating the boy in combat] Ha, ha, never assume because a man has no eyes he cannot see. Close your eyes. What do you hear? Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds. Master Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat? Young Caine: No. Master Po: Do you hear the grasshopper that is at your feet? Young Caine: [looking down and seeing the insect] Old man, how is it that you hear these things? Master Po: Young man, how is it that you do not? (From IMDB)
Like Young Caine, I have, and still do, get my wrist slapped now and again by the Atlassian Developers. Most recently it was for my post yesterday on our other blog, the Developer Blog. Chris sent me a friendly-enough email:
subject: marketing on the developer blog I just read your blog post on the developer blog today and I thought I should share my thoughts. It seems a little off-topic for the developer blog.... It's unlike the purpose of other posts on the dev blog, to explain and explore technical stuff for the benefit of the readers. Developers sign up to the blog because of the information they get from it.
Openness and healthy conversations One of the things I love about working here is the healthy debate on just about every topic. It can be frustrating at times. But 99.99% of the time I really appreciate the open, candid environment that the company has fostered ever since it was founded (I've only been here for the last two years, but I'm pretty sure openness was always part of the bedrock!). Though I've worked around engineers for the last 8 years, I don't have a software engineering background, and therefore I think my batting average is about .500 in terms of determining what topics would be of interest to the developer community. Just because you join the club, doesn't mean you speak the language—certainly not right away. Culture is a learned thing. In the last couple years, at least a couple people have asked me how I learned the Atlassian voice. The evidence is in: I'm still learning it. Conversations and learning are are expedited in an open environment, and the feedback from the internal and external Atlassian communities are always helpful and positive. My email response to Chris:
Comments appreciated. The title of my blog and subject of Splunk's post was "pragmatic marketing" but the post itself was about JIRA's central role in their new agile development process. That sounds very developer-centric to my ears.... Next time I consider blogging there, I'll ask for a few opinions first.
Master Kan: Quickly as you can, snatch the pebble from my hand. [Young Caine tries to do so and fails] Master Kan: When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave. Time to take my leave. As always... comments welcome anytime. :)
September 14, 06:07 AM
Releasing Our Inner Geeks at FedEx VI
Atlassian developers have started to blog about their FedEx Day projects. Last week, FedEx VI took place; it's a semi-regular "open coding" day wherein the developers can work on whatever pet project they're interested in. The VI designation is a pretty good indicator that it's been going on for some time. This time around, I decided the Marketing team should participate. That meant we had to translate the tasks developers normally do into tasks that non-coding types can accomplish. As far as criteria goes, I said that the main criteria is that the project should (1) be marketing-related and (2) helps Atlassian. Bonus points for doing something that helps customers! But that was vague. So I tried to define it further as follows:
Marketing projects should fall along these lines:
  • Generate leads
  • Generate buzz
  • Help customers and evaluators
  • Build brand
What I wanted most was for the marketing team to let go of their usual daily tasks and take a chance on something they've always wanted to try, something new, or on a task that would typically fall outside of their normal responsibilities. On an internal blog, I wrote:
This is an experiment. Maybe we don't get it right, or we only get it 50% right, but it will evolve. I'm not worried about failure as much as I am about failing without learning from our mistakes.
For my part, I teamed up with Stewart on a project (some developers here do solo projects, others do team coding on one project) to develop a presentation about the growth of wikipatterns.com (he'll blog about it more). Laurel worked on a project that Steve had suggested: interviewing other Atlassians (and publishing the interviews) as a way of telling more people about who works here. Zach, who manages our website, rolled up his sleeves to create a Confluence plugin, and Digant helped further clarify and promote our sponsorships for JUGs. So, what did I learn from this experience?
  • We should spend more time on so-called pet projects; I found it helped me tap into my right-brain thinking more and gave me new ideas for other projects
  • While Stewart and I thought we knew exactly what we were in for in producing this presentation and video, we discovered that it would have been good to do a little bit more research on the project before starting!
  • Even if the suffle didn't rise as hoped, we learned a lot about doing it right the next time.
Atlassian Marketing Blog

Profile

Jon Silvers
Computer Software | San Francisco Bay Area, US
My LinkedIn
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz