I have been toying with a "soft conversion" concept lately, and took the opportunity to present and refine my concept during my presentation at Innotech Oklahoma.
In short, you have hard conversion:
Online Sale
Phone Call
Contact us
Fill out a form, in exchange for white paper, newsletter, etc.
There are many more that I will not list, but the point: All of that is track able, data exchanges both directions, and its the beginning of a relationship.
Soft conversion: A consumer engages with you, without the exchange of data. Two examples that come to mind: RSS subscription, or Monitor your Social Activity
Clicks and subscriptions might be track able (if you use feedburner for example), but marketers might not be able to identify the end consumer. Its a soft engagement, for someone not ready to have that 2 way dialogue, but wants to keep you and your resources on the radar.
CASE STUDY: I have an employee moving to NYC to start up our Manhattan office. He inquired about industry sites, and an email went around the company compiling sites that everyone reads.
I decided that there must be a better way to organize those resources, and was thinking about a shared delicious account. Most of us have our own accounts, and it might not make sense to populate and manage two of them.
One option: aggregate participating delicious feeds into one, and create one master file. Hmm, this could get cluttered, and I might lose the concept of “20 sites that we read” with all the other tagged content.
Then I figured I could collect all delicious usernames, so we could network. Again, it becomes cluttered, with too many layers of content, and too much effort to navigate.
Back to my original point. Why should I only share this internally. Why not use it as a tool to engage a client or prospect, put our content at the top, invite participation with a notepad widget, and start driving traffic.
In short, it is soft conversion, and I am not 100% convinced that the tool will drive traffic back to me, as a consultant, to address specific needs of prospects. But hey, what is there to lose.
I attended a workshop at Innotech Oklahoma recently, and came away with some great sites. I have not had a chance to explore these in detail, but the concepts are solid.
Luminocity: Brain training
Competitus- Monitor your competition
Conduit- Create a custom, branded toolbar that you can share with others
Mocospace- Location aware community
Mycybertwin- Personality profile wizard creates an alter ego that can communicate in your place
Eswarm- you find a product you want, post it, build a group that also wants it, and negotiate with the manufacturer for a bulk discount
Dellideastorm- social sourcing for product development.
Fetchback- software that can chase a consumer around the web, pushing relevant banner ads based on activity on a particular website (abandoned shopping cart, etc.)
http://www.wefeelfine.org/: spider that pulls “we feel _____”, parses the data, and displays as an interface. Take it one step further for market research:
my bank is ______, my dentist is ______, my ESP is _______
