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Dec 31

The Marketing Weapon of Choice for 2010: Listening

December 31, 2009 • View Comments • Online Marketing

engage
Hugh MacLeod’s delivery is a little more um, to the point than mine would be. Some people need the message spelled out in black and white.

When a company first starts using social media, it’s like watching someone’s dad play with his first video camera. They seem to share everything in an attempt to “engage” just to show some results. That’s not a judgment, mind you. Everyone has to start somewhere and it’s just counterproductive to be mean about it.

The most powerful thing you can use social media for is listening. “Engaging” your audience without fully understanding who they are and how they relate to you is not engaging at all–it is as irritating as the ad that won’t stop blinking on the blog you are reading.

It is easier than you think to make people to want and need your product. Use tools like Tweetdeck, Google Alerts, RSS, Radian6, Community Insights or ScoutLabs and listen. Track terms in your industry, follow the players who are thought leaders in your space. Understand the current issues occurring in your industry. Create a product that goes above and beyond to solve these issues while not creating lots of other issues. Then show people your product. You can use an ad, a social media guru, whatever. The medium isn’t nearly as important as the message, which is “We are solving these issues you have.”

Listening and then acting upon what people need is far more powerful than any “engaging” you can do. I predict the companies that do it best will win out in 2010.

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Dec 04

Be Bobby Fisher Instead of the One Hit Wonder in Your Marketing Campaigns

December 4, 2009 • View Comments • Online Marketing

marketing chess movesMarketing is like a chess game. You need to set things up first before you can get your big wins.

That’s why I genuinely don’t focus on numbers until numbers are needed. I focus on what the late and great Elvis would say, “Taking Care of Business.”

The question we as marketers should not always be “What can I do to get more customers or traffic?” This is an instant gratification response. It feels great to log into Analytics and see that spike, but it isn’t necessarily going to last. The question should be “What messaging should we put across to make our company more sustainable and therefore profitable in the future?”

Think about it: if I put out one message that gets me 500 customers, great. That’s 500 customers I didn’t have before. BUT, if I put out a message that gets me the passionate lead architect or designer I needed to make my product great, that person has the potential of getting me thousands if not millions of customers with a fraction of the work. My message in a small, obscure community could get me one big investor who helps save my company. Who cares if only five people saw one particular message?

Each marketing message shouldn’t be about bringing in masses. It can be used to bring in employees, investors, partners, company cheerleaders who essentially do the selling for you, or press fanboys. You’re just communicating. As in chess, a big bold move too soon can make you vulnerable to attack from your enemy. Setting up the pieces first means you are in a better position to let numbers drive themselves.

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Nov 08

Twitter Lists: Find Useful People to Follow in Half the Time

November 8, 2009 • View Comments • Twitter

I can honestly say I turned a lot of people onto TweetDeck. My friend Renato and I made this video back in the day about how its listing featured allowed you better organize people on Twitter. That was a big deal then.

Now I know this isn’t terribly new news, but Twitter Lists are pretty cool. Looking at who a person follows is something Robert Scoble has been doing for a while now, and now Twitter has been nice and has allowed us to all do this with half the work with categorization to boot. Essentially, they now allow us to share the groups we’d already set up in Twitter clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck, which is a huge catalyst to social networking in general.

I have created a few lists so far and will continue to create more with the intention that if you follow my lists, you will actually gain value by using Twitter. There are a lot of uses for them and until TweetDeck incorporates them (which I’ve heard it will, and Seesmic already has), I can see myself using them almost exclusively. I am also hunting for other people’s useful lists and have noticed that a lot of the people who are really savvy to certain industries are too busy to create them. I hope after time this changes (*hint hint*).

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Nov 01

Game Theory and the Use of Social Media

November 1, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

I’m reading a book called The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley. I found it on Trey Ratcliff’s book list, which is quite good and I recommend highly.

The book features a perfect study to point out when someone says “Why should I waste my time with Twitter or blogging?” In the study,

“Adam is given £100 and was told to share it with Bob. Adam must say how much he intends to give to Bob and, if Bob refuses the offer, neither will get anything at all. If Bob accepts, then he gets what Adam has offered. The logical thing for Adam to do, assuming he thinks Bob is also a rational fellow, is to offer Bob a derisory sum, say one pound, and keep the remaining £99. Bob should rationally accept this, because then he is £1 better off. If he refuses, he will get nothing.

But not only do very few people offer such a small sum when asked to act Adam’s part, even fewer accept such exiguous offers when playing Bob’s part. By far the commonest offer made by real Adams is £50. Like so many games in psychology, the purpose of the ultimatum bargaining game is to reveal how irrational we are and wonder at the fact. But Frank’s theory has little difficulty explaining this ‘irrationality’, ven finding it to be sensible. People care about fairness as well as self-interest. They do not expect to be offered such a derisory sum by someone in Adam’s position and they refuse it because irrational obstinacy is a good way of telling people so. Likewise, when playing Adam, they make a ‘fair’ offer of 50:50 to show how fair and trustworthy they are should future opportunities arise that depend on trust. Would you risk your good reputation with your friends for a lousy £50?”

Ridley continues by explaining this simple truth: when experimenters try the same exercise but each party suddenly becomes anonymous to each other, the person in the giving role more than often gives £1 to the other party.

Why is the simple acknowledgment of identity so important in fair dealings between two parties? Why are we so much more giving to those we know than we are to strangers?

Identity introduces the concept of accountability. Social media tools allow us to bring our identity and our networks’ identities to the forefront. Basically if you hose somebody, they can now call it out to your friends and followers, which they would not be able to do in the often anonymous world we used to live in.

So you can say you “don’t have time for social media”, but bear in mind that you may end up receiving £1 when you could be getting 50.

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Oct 26

Today, I became a Racker

October 26, 2009 • View Comments • Upcoming Events

rackspace-web-hosting

Today, I joined the Rackspace team. It’s been a few months because we were trying to find the right fit, but I think we finally did it. I will say that I really like everyone I’ve met so far and am very optimistic about this opportunity.

Basically, Jim Curry (@jimcurry) and Mark Collier (@sparkycollier) work their tails off getting partners to integrate with the Rackspace Cloud. And then they put the tools on this site called Rackspace Tools and hopefully people use them. They really don’t have anyone marketing the site.

qSo my job is to to be like Q from James Bond or Alfred from Batman and show you all the cool tools you can utilize with the Rackspace Cloud. There is the CloudPlug which will automagically back up your hard drives to the cloud. There is Vanilla Forums, an open source forum software with some really cool plugins. Then there are tools for easily managing or load balancing servers like CloudKick or Zeus Load Balancer.

There are so many good applications and tools that help you both manage and better utilize the cloud, and I get to show them to you. Will they include exploding cuff links or machine gun pens? Maybe not…yet.

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Sep 22

The Mark That Your Company Culture is Broken

September 22, 2009 • View Comments • Other Social Networks

I get LinkedIn invites from time to time. Although I’m not a huge user of LinkedIn, I see its merits in its ability to basically get straight to the nitty gritty of someone’s work experience. After all, I like recommending friends for jobs, but not as much as I like recommending people who are actually competent at what they do.

I notice often that employed people often do not put their company affiliations on their profiles. I can see why you might do this in Twitter or in Facebook. Those can be used for business use, but can also be used for very personable exchanges. But LinkedIn is very business oriented. If a person doesn’t list their company on their profile, there’s a good chance they are looking for another job.

If you are an executive and you think your company culture is good, do yourself a favor. Search for your employees’ LinkedIn profiles and see what they list. Look to see what they are looking for on LinkedIn. Are they looking for business development or sales opportunities, or are they looking for jobs? If your company is either a small part or no part of their profile, that person isn’t happy with you and wants to leave. That’s not the attitude you want in an employee.

HUGE CAVEAT:
That doesn’t mean you should fire that person. Why? Because simply dismissing an unhappy employee is a great way to miss an opportunity for how you can make your company better. That seems very wasteful. An honest and open dialog can fix the problem and can make both your employee and you very happy.

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Sep 20

Easy to Implement Tip: Be an Interesting Commenter

September 20, 2009 • View Comments • Blogs

It didn’t hit me until Chris Brogan’s talk on Thursday that I’ve actually been doing this whole social media thing for a while now, and I can really help people who are struggling with it.

I was a Community Manager for a software company before that was even a title. One role I had at my job was leaving comments on blogs that our potential audience would read so as to attract bloggers to talk about our software.

One blog liked my comments so much, they ended up interviewing me for the publication. Since I commented on so many blogs in the industry, I established an authority and it become a lot easier for me to get my stories published in their blogs.

A lot of comments on blogs simply say “Right on. Good job on this one.” Some people use social media “strategies” like favoriting pictures influencers take or retweeting something just to garner favor. While this won’t really hurt you, it won’t help you too much either, unless you are sincerely favoriting a photo you like or are retweeting something your followers would want to hear. Why? Because bloggers are always looking for more stories to tell. They aren’t looking to be pandered to (at least the good ones aren’t). By adding to the conversation, you are 1.) establishing your authority and 2.) making the blog post better in general. I love it when the comments on my blog are actually more interesting than the post itself. It means I have interesting and potentially influential readers, which means I have more power than a silly blogger just looking for attention.

If you can’t really add value to the conversation, it’s okay to just read because eventually you’ll read enough of blogs or books in your subject to be knowledgeable. If you don’t feel compelled to do this, you aren’t interested in your subject matter and you should do something else in your career. Jes’ sayin’.

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Sep 14

The Air Jordan Effect–It’s Not Just for Shoes Anymore

September 14, 2009 • View Comments • Marketing and Labor

Product Development as MarketingPeople often focus on getting huge numbers of followers behind a product. They pour all of their efforts into getting more, often before a product is ready for release. This inevitably amounts to more confusion because your crowd will have different needs, values, and dedication to what you are doing. What does it take to create a great product?

One key person.

The example I frequently use for this is Air Jordan shoes. Michael Jordan is the tour de force that took Nike from being a running shoe company into the biggest athletic shoe company in the world. When he first graduated from North Carolina, Jordan actually had no interest in Nike and instead wanted to pursue Converse or Adidas. Neither company had any interest in Jordan, and it was actually Jordan’s agent David Falk who saw the opportunity in a potential Air Jordan shoe. Jordan was paid $2.5 million over five years, a ridiculous sum for the time.

Jordan’s shoe was black and flashy instead of the standard white. It was different, so different that the NBA actually fined Jordan for wearing them. Oh well, it added to the appeal. Air Jordans have consistently been one of the top selling basketball shoes in the world since their inception. You can find all sorts of generations of Air Jordans still available online.

Nike went after someone they considered the next superstar. It was a risky, irrational move that made them billions of dollars and secured their spot as the dominant shoe company in the world.

By targeting influencers and building products around them versus focusing on building sheer numbers, you’ll know that your product will be able to hold its own versus the competition. Why? You are focusing on the user of the product–not the product itself. Just don’t drop the ball when it comes to taking care of those who end up buying it.

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Aug 11

Why Facebook’s Acquisition of FriendFeed is Culturally Significant

August 11, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

Today, Facebook acquired the social network aggregator FriendFeed. Some people on Twitter didn’t understand why I cared. Here’s why:

I have done everything I can to make social networks “user friendly” and mainstream. I don’t WANT tweetups to be cliquish and I have never tried to exclude my circle to just people who have a lot of followers. Whether it was the Blood Drive Tweetup, Twestival, a NameCheap contest, a GeekAustin meetup or another one of my social networking exploits, I’ve always tried to provide incentive for people who normally considered social networking incestuous and lame to try it out. People meet and then actually have something to talk about besides social networking.

Most people groan when you mention another social network. They’ve built their contacts and they don’t intend to spend all of their time rebuilding a network. When someone mentioned FriendFeed, I did the same thing. But then I saw how easy it makes organizing your contacts and how it facilitates conversation across social networking lines. FriendFeed is an aggregator of social networks. People who post on Flickr or YouTube can easily communicate with people who like Twitter without sacrificing the functionality they like. That’s the beauty of an aggregator like FriendFeed–it allows you to see the sum of the parts without having to tear them apart or jumble them into an unusable mess.

Bloggers like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray like FriendFeed for the chatting and real-time search capabilities. You can search a topic on FriendFeed and it will comb through any content from any network, so long as that person uses FriendFeed. Again, very awesome.

Here’s the issue though–very few people actually used it, and those who did were social media early adopters. So it was easy to fall in love with the platform, but the community itself was very limited. This limits the amount of useful data someone like Scoble would get for search, and it means I can’t really follow all the people I would want to follow because they are too busy being interesting and not setting up social networks like FriendFeed.

Steve Rubel pointed out that lifestreaming is finally going “mainstream” by this acquisition. This is my favorite part. Instead of having networks of Twitter users or network of Flickr groups, we can have groups that are united not by their platform of choice, but by their ideas. After all, most people who use social networks do indeed use Facebook. If FriendFeed’s capabilities are integrated into Facebook (which they can be already but most people don’t do), someone who takes pictures of Iran and posts them to Flickr can easily find and track a blogger from the region via Facebook. One artist can post a YouTube video of him playing a Beatles song, and another can put up a blog post of himself singing the same song. A simple FriendFeed search of the title connects them both. Facebook has essentially taken out the 400 pound gorilla that is actually marketing a social network for FriendFeed.

Will this be an issue for the security of our data? If enough people complain, they will change, because there is always the threat that someone like Google will come along and do it better.

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Aug 05

Why “The Oprah Effect” Can Trump “Free!”

August 5, 2009 • View Comments • Online Marketing

I don’t watch the Oprah. Maybe this makes me callous because I’m a woman and therefore am supposed to, but I can live with that.

As a marketer, I LOVE the Oprah. Oprah is a landmark. She is the only person who can legitimately be afraid of beef and then gets sued for it. Oprah’s endorsement has sparked careers (see Jill Scott and Barack Obama), sparked new martini crazes, and books like The Secret. Oprah’s blessing on your brand is basically money in the bank, and well, I think she knows that.

WHY is Oprah’s endorsement so powerful? Because it’s genuine. When Oprah recommends her favorite things, they actually are her favorite things at that time. People don’t have to figure out if she has ulterior motives or not and they know she doesn’t need the money. She’s also not doing it as a favor to someone else.

So all this talk of “Free!” being the new economy. I admit, free can and does work. I’m not telling you to ignore Chris Anderson’s book because I haven’t read it although I’m a bit afraid of the hype (that goes out to Seth Godin). The hardest part of getting customers is acquisition and if you reduce the barrier it takes for customers to get to you, they are more likely to use you. But “Free!” is not and will not be a savior. If you give me something for free and it sucks, I will not only not use it again, I will tell my friends not to use it either. Or I’ll tell them, “Hey, it’s not bad for being free, but I wouldn’t pay for it”. You can fix it to be better, but you’ve already given me the first impression that you aren’t the best out there. Why would I get burned again by even spending the time to listen to your “Hey, we fixed it” pitch? My time is my money and you’ve already burned me once.

So back to what I deem “the Oprah Effect”. Oprah is genuine and she is powerful. Her viewers know that she is picky and intelligent, so she has basically sorted through the crap (free or not) to show them ONLY things that are good. So sight unseen, free or not, they will buy what she recommends to them in droves. If you are a competitor to this product, people won’t care if your product is free if it isn’t good.

A truly genuine endorsement from an intelligent and powerful person will trump something that is merely free every time. The only way to get an endorsement is to create something people like and then ask them to spread the word. If you are launching something for free that sucks, admit in your marketing that you are looking for feedback. Let people shape your brand to make it not suck. Grandfather those people in at free for helping you out, and start charging for the product.

THEN get on Oprah. Or if you can’t get on Oprah, get on the equivalent of your Oprah in your specialty field. Or make customers feel like Oprah for recommending you. That’s for you to decide.

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