TraceWorks has passed a milestone by entering the Swedish market. We are happy to announce a new partnership with Compost, a Swedish software company, which will resell our solutions to their customers. Our Danish sales team will also work from Compost’s offices.

The partnership works both ways, as Compost’s star solution, Carma, will be included in our offerings.

Carma makes it possible to track how a recipient of an e-mail and/or SMS responds to the options presented to them: Which links he or she opens, and which actions he or she makes – leading to either sale or contact. In this way, it is possible for the marketing department to keep track of sales and marketing campaigns and to register the preferences of the recipient.

Carma offers the marketer a unique tool for reviewing the effect of e-mail and/or SMS-based communication. With Carma the marketer will learn which initiatives work best in order to increase his or her customer and prospect base.

Needless to say, we expect you to expect much from Carma and our Swedish sales team.

Interested in more information? Call Christoffer Feldt-Sørensen on mobile +45 2888 5071 cfs@traceworks.com or go to www.traceworks.com and www.compost.se.

When waking up every morning and trying to figure out how to fill out these oversized shoes I have been handed by our two visionary owners, Morten Wulff and Anders Lau, as well as my CEO Christian Dam I feel somewhat like trying to mount a starving Rancor only wearing a pair of bacon Speedos.

Looks were decieving
It is not that I do not like the challenge; I honestly love it. However it is a task that grows as I entrench myself into the corners of the beast we call online marketing. From miles away it seemed like nothing more than a heavily sedated kitten and I must admit I looked forward to picking it up and petting it gently on its back while it purred predictably with a rewarding look in its eyes.

As the early weeks have soon grown into 1½ months, it has become obvious that the kitten has grown somewhat more threatening and ferocious in the looking glass and thus I have had to adopt a different and more systematized strategy to tame it, let alone pet it.

I love boxes
Categorizing the problems has seemed to work though. I have come to the conclusion that not only do categories help me define a solution to the problem of understanding the beast itself; It also gives me a weapon with which I can use in helping the world taming their own pet Rancor.

I am waking up happy these mornings and seem to get closer every day to a definition of online marketing as a measurable process within an organization. I have defined the categories and subcategories to form the frame of my solution and have made a draft survey to identify and measure precisely which information one of the major category holds and how this impacts the total online marketing organization.

The revolution is at hand
Soon enough I will be riding my Rancor down your busy online highway screaming and waving at you in definance with my Business Intelligence hat in my hand, not entirely unlike Major Kong riding the Atomic Bomb in the end scene of “Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and start to love the bomb”. At least I hope I will and I will happily tell you all how I did it.

I am sure we will meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

This hasn’t exactly been the best of weeks: Two days ago some scoundrels stole our Wii!

Today someone had the indecency of cutting our phone wires (which at some point perhaps is more critical than the Wii-thing in our everyday life).

Our phones are back on line, but our internet connection is still suffering. This means that we can’t receive any mails!

If you have anything on your mind call us on our mobile numbers - we could really need some attention and we are getting bored.

Update 18th of April 7.30 AM: You probably won’t believe it, but our mail servers are still down. Readers familiar with Danish can get more information at our service provider TDC.

Update 21st of April 9.00 AM: Apparently this has turned into the most complicated cable problem in the history of mankind. Latest update is that a there are no news until Wednesday 23th of April.

StatoilHydro is now user of Headlight. StatoilHydro are going to use the Headlight system worldwide and they are looking forward to see the results of their campaigns and to have a totally global overview. TraceWorks are welcoming StatoilHydro as a “TraceWorks Member”.

Fast food for the brain
Business Intelligence, that’s what I am all about. I like thinking up new ways to empower companies, customers and partnerships to function and perform more efficiently. I guess being brainwashed as a former long term McDonald’s employees has made me dream in terms of business processes and standardization optimization.

Although not being the most attractive place to work in terms of wages it sure has one of the most precise value chains and business models around. Their concept of product standardization to fit equal customer experiences around the globe is a staggering information warehouse, shared with each individual employee when starting a career in the burger industry.

Knowing that it takes exactly 1 ounce of lettuce on a BigMac or that the bottom half of a clamshell grill must be 350 degrees Fahrenheit might seem as superfluous information, but indeed it embodies the “best in class performance” that McDonald’s strive to achieve. Their value chain is fine tuned to deliver just the right quality pr $ fast food your demand dictates.

Online marketing standards
When thinking of what I can do as a new employee around here, I stumbled upon our cool product Headlight™ and started browsing. It certainly seems that value chain management in online marketing is what we live for in TraceWorks. Headlight™ supports just that, enabling you to connect your activities and measure your succes.

Knowing what Banners, e-mail campaigns, Google ads and natural referrers are creating revenue is important but knowing if you are still underperforming is even more important. Specific areas in goal setting, planning, execution and performance measurement can be off setting the whole value chain and result in catastrophic if not just worse performance overall. Headlight™ helps you avoid such disaster by delivering the ability to plan and quantify these essential activities. In a succesful company that reaches their goals and actually has a solid value chain, it is not always easy to asses which part of your organization surrounding online marketing is dragging the others down and in successful online marketing divisions it can be even harder to identify which areas of the value chain that could contribute to an even better performance.

Wondering about competition
I have always been wondering how they did it in Burger King. I was convinced that they must be worse at least in some aspects or that their value chain optimization would not be a valid parameter to benchmark against. I was sure that they pre-grilled their beef patties, served food that was too old or even picked up dropped food from the ground and served it; the holy grail of any McDonald’s. If you want to lose your job, pick something up and put it on a tray.

I was convinced we were the best, but I was at best making a qualified guess. Wondering about all these things is helpful, but does not present you with any motivation to improve your own operation. My point is that even though you have the most effecient overall value chain in your industry, you could still be outperformed by your competition when it comes to specific areas.

What if we could actually know what areas we were, albeit successful, then lagging behind compared to the competition, the regional market or in the general industry. What if online marketing could actually be compared to each other and one could motivate online marketing divisions to improve performance and precisely demonstrate which areas they were market leaders and which they were not. It leaves you with the same wonder that I once had flipping burgers while studying to for my bachelors in business management and information technology.

Help us help you!
What are you wondering about? I am sure that many of you in online marketing divisions around the globe wonder if you are actually the best at creating conversions off banners, if your ROI on PCC marketing is the highest, if you have the highest Click Through Rates or simply if you are most efficient at converting visitors to sales. My question is simple. If you could pick 5 to 10 questions about your industry or competitions online marketing ability, what would they be? What parameters would you like to benchmark yourself against in online marketing?

It’s almost impossible to do any real productive work using traditional mobile phones - even though vendors claim they provide just that.

The iPhone is changing all of that! Browsing is a pleasure and text entry is easy and comfortable. It really allows anyone to finally gain mobile productivity.

Headlight is all about increasing marketing productivity so obviously we’ve developed an app for the iPhone. As always we’ve strived towards making it very simple and intuitive.

The Headlight+iPhone App allows you to check-up on active banner, email or SEM campaigns, marketing strategy goals, and quickly gain access to your marketing contacts.

It’s probably the world’s first Iphone enabled Marketing Control panel and it’s right here:

http://m.headlighthq.com

Enjoy! Love, TraceWorks

Poets and Plumbers is a new industry-wide movement whose aim is to bridge the culture and knowledge gaps between poets (traditionally trained marketers who know little of Web 2.0 marketing techniques) and plumbers (technology-oriented new-school marketers who think in terms of data, patterns and processes). The movement’s launch event gathered over 200 leading marketers to kick off a full program of courses, seminars, networking events and similar.

At the core of Poets and Plumbers is a carefully selected Dream Team of Denmark’s best new-school marketer. Each member is a pioneer in his or her field, and burns to change the face of marketing toward a more innovative, more ROI-focused model that communicates with its target audiences in ways that are a better match for today’s world. At the same time, each member must be an entrepreneur – that is, they must have founded or co-founded their own companies. Requirements such as these, along with a string of other demands, ensure this Dream Team of marketing revolutionaries has the competence, energy and connections to form a ”burning platform” for change.

Morten E. Wulff was approached by Poets and Plumbers because his profile was a perfect match for the exclusive Dream Team of marketers at the core of the movement: a technology-driven marketing pioneer and self-made entrepreneur with a clear vision of changing traditional marketing models and processes for the better.

Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin - a Danish business-weekly - has just elected the top-100 young entrepreneurs in Denmark. To our great pleasure one of our founders - Anders Lau Nielsen - tops the even more exclusive top-10 of the most promising individuals.

As Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin puts it, the criterium has been to find the elite within the ‘young, forward-driven and result-oriented.
Should you be interested and Danish-speaking, you can read the entire article in the Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin special ‘Talent100′ (out today) or the resume.

Here’s a rare opportunity to see what we’re working on in the design department, when we’re not beating the sales team to a bloody pulp in Wii Tennis.

(Warning, long post, but you can scroll down to the pretty pictures if you only have a sec before Paradise Hotel is on).

This is an idea I came up with when browsing historic tube maps of the London Underground. What weirdo browses tube maps you may ask. You just use tube maps to figure out how to get from Piccadilly Circus to Camden market and that’s it, right?

That’s exactly why they’re interesting. Tube maps are remarkable examples of good information graphics.

Here’s an example:
Think of the last time you used a tube map. Try to think of a specific design detail that you either hated or thought was cool…

Nothing specific pops into mind right?

Now try to recall a time where you couldn’t figure out which tube stops on what stations…

Again, nothing.

That’s because tube maps are so well designed. They’re visually pleasing, but still nothing steals your attention away from the actual task. That’s in essence how every interface should be.

Now on to the funnel chart concept.
In a way funnel charts is like tube maps. They show something “traveling” from A to B and every stop in between. In this case A is the entry into the funnel, B is the final step in the funnel a.k.a. the conversion point, and all the stops in between is the various web pages in the funnel.

Below is an illustration where I’ve tried to visualize the idea.

Of course the end result should require no explanations, but since this concept is in it’s very early stages, here’s a quick description of what you see.

1. On the left, you see all the entries into the funnel. It could be directly from a specific marketing activity, another page, or another site etc.
2. Behind the colored lines in the middle is some boxes representing the pages in the funnel.
3. To the left you see where all the people went, who didn’t continue down the funnel.
4. Each colored line represent a source that led people into a specific page in the funnel.

The idea is that you are able to follow the source (A) all the way to either conversion (B) or where they exit from the funnel (the stops in between).

Here’s an idea for interaction that would help to home in on the path from a specific source.

That’s it. A hundred years old information graphics design is inspiration for cutting edge software of tomorrow. Actually it is exactly hundred years ago in 1908 that one of the first London tube maps with separate colored lines was created. So let’s call this post a tribute to the great tube maps of yesterday.

(source: A History of the London Tube Maps)

Skilled Interface Designer wanted
We are looking for a talented graphic Interface designer to join our design team in creating astonishing interfaces for our marketing suite, Headlight. As designer you will join the creative design crew of our chief designer, design communicator, and chief of innovation. Your task will be to participate in the conceptual design phase to the final development phase, by visualizing ideas, designing finished screens, to creating HTML mock-ups for future Headlight modules.

At TraceWorks we have strong opinions on how we want our software to look, and how it feels to work with. Endless feature lists doesn’t mean much to us. It is more important that our software fulfill the actual needs of our customers and is a pleasure to work with. By constant use of the latest knowledge and technology, we are continuously pushing the barriers of what our customers are able get done with our software. Our highest priority is to break down complicated marketing data into comprehensible actionable information that doesn’t require a doctor’s degree to interpret.

Needed qualifications:

• Passionate about graphic user interface design
• Strong theory of general graphic design
• Creative and has good illustration skills
• Strong in web design technologies like HTML and CSS.
• Fluent in relevant Adobe software
• Good skills with Flash and JavaScript is a plus
• Comprehension of online marketing is a plus

To learn a little on what we’re influenced and inspired by, check out this post on The Dojo

To learn more about working at TraceWorks and how to apply, go see the jobs section