Archives for May 2010

Around where I work, there is a crew that mows the grass throughout the Summer. When I say “throughout the Summer,” I mean that they have specifically scheduled days on which they perform their duties. They perform those duties whether it is hailing, sunny, warm, cold, rainy, or droughty. There could be nothing but dirt left and they would still probably come to mow the grass just because it is what they have always done, it’s what they’ve been told to do, and it seems to work.

I mention this because I think sometimes companies get into ruts with their marketing. Maybe marketers get in ruts with their recommendations, too.

Every Year is a Winding Road

Beginning in about July or so, and really throughout the year, we start formulating ideas that will evolve into the backbones of our proposed marketing plans for our clients. It would be easy to say, “Well, you did six print ads in this publication last year and it didn’t seem to hurt anything. Let’s do that again!” But that is not really the best approach. Maybe it never was, but it certainly is not now. We’ve noticed that due to time constraints and a multitude of other responsibilities, companies who handle their own marketing often fall into these kinds of thought patterns. It’s easy to manage, it does some good. What more could you ask for?
In fact, though, a lot can happen in a year. Publications can launch and fail. Websites can launch and fail. Heck, really anything can launch or fail. Sometimes the same thing does both in the span of a year. It’s a lot to keep track of. There are so many details to monitor, and now that the BPA has started to audit websites in addition to print publications, there’s going to be even more to get our arms around.

If you don’t approach a marketing plan from a fresh perspective, you can end up mowing grass that is already dead. You can end up trying to seed a parking lot while there are plant beds all ready and waiting just a few yards away. Increasingly, tightly scheduled, “perfect” repeatable plans can be deadly. A company cannot possibly pursue everything there is to pursue now over a year-long period. A company that has always relied on print can start dabbling with online advertising. A company that has done nothing but collateral could look at updating their website. A company that has sworn off print could look at a really innovative direct mail campaign. That’s right — using paper. Just repeating what has been done “since I started” or “for as long as this company has been in business” is not just a boring approach to the new world, but it also is dangerous. It will make you look lazy. It will make you look like you are behind the times. And that’s not a good place to be.

So before you decide that you are going to mow the grass every Wednesday and Friday no matter what the elements tell you to do, take a step back and actually look at the yard you have. Does it really need to be mowed today? Maybe it’s time to try something new. You could always go back to mowing next week.

Image by octavian napoleon. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/octavianuk

It’s always nice when you find out that something you’ve been thinking about and even talking about has crossed the mind of an expert. For example, if you put together an experimental recipe only to find out that a very similar recipe just helped someone win Iron Chef, that would be a great feeling.

My moment of joy is equally intense though slightly less delicious. For several months, I have been thinking about the intersection between Social Media and editorial calendars. One of the most common flags that arise when you mention Social Media is the fear that there is just not enough content or not enough time to create that content. Having begun my professional career as a B2B media buyer, the idea of the editorial calendar crossed my mind. Yes, even for Twitter.


How would this work?

Granted, a lot of the action you see on Twitter and Facebook is interaction. It’s responding, retweeting, and all that stuff. If you follow Chris Brogan’s rules about blogging, you should have about 1 of your own posts for every 10-12 replies or retweets. But still, that can mean 2-3 tweets/day. And if there isn’t blistering hot news about you, your brand, or your company, what can you say? That’s where the idea of the editorial calendar comes in. Like a publisher’s editorial calendar, it doesn’t have to be 100% pinned down, but you can have some ideas. “In May we’re going to that trade show, so let’s tweet to drive traffic and interest.” Get the topic ready and the tweets and updates and blog posts will come. If you plan ahead, your mind starts working on these ideas. There is your content.

So what other brilliant person had thought of this already?

I was perusing YouTube for some of Denise Wakeman’s blog videos, and I found this interview with Michael Stelzner.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8kec6mSX1s&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

You guessed it, Denise, Blog Squad queen, mentions putting together an editorial calendar for blogging.

The really powerful thing about putting together an editorial calendar for your Social Media campaign is that this can assist you in building a truly integrated campaign. What print ads or online ads are you going to be using in June? Can some of that messaging be built upon for a blog post or a Facebook update? You probably have more content than you realize. It just needs to be thought of in different ways.

If you’ve tried something like this before, let me know how it worked for you! I have tried it myself and found that it immediately made posting a far less cumbersome and stressful process. Hey, that’s something I always am shooting for!

Image by Jan Willem Geertsma. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/jan-willem

 I was watching a really impressive webinar today. Very good points that I haven’t heard anyone make, at least in my sphere of knowledge and experience. Indeed, I was so impressed with this person that I decided to click to their website to learn some more. From there, I was taken to the site for one of this person’s books, which I was considering buying on the spot.

What stunned me, and the reason that I am blogging right now instead of buying a book on Amazon, is that in glancing at the first few lines of copy on the site, I saw two major flubs.

Now, we all make mistakes. I mean, everyone except me. (ha ha) But it really seems like a lot of people are either not cognizant of this fact or they just don’t care. This is a sad thing, because to me, a poorly constructed sentence, a misspelled word, or something else along those lines not only bespeaks the potential for not having a grasp of English (pet peeve), but it also tells me that this person doesn’t care enough to give things a once-over.

I kind of get laughed at sometimes at my place of employ because I insist on proofreading everything. Thoroughly. My rule: if a page is touched, even if it’s just a minor correction, you proof the whole page. Why? Making a single change can push a word down to the next line, which in turn can push the copy into the footer area of a brochure or website. If you don’t proofread and really look carefully, you can end up with a product that looks sloppy. It will look like you didn’t want to take the time to do things right.

I’m not going to lie to you. Proofreading can be boring. Torturous even. If you are proofreading an e-commerce site or a sales brochure with lots and lots of useful tables and charts, you might feel like you need regular injections of pixie sticks right into your ole veins. But these are steps that have to be taken. I can’t tell you how many times proofreading has resulted in us asking questions that really made our clients analyze what they were presenting. “Did you mean to say pack here, or should it say bulk pack?” “Should this be 20 inches or 20 feet?” Little strokes of the keyboard, but boy what a difference.

I did not end up buying this presenter’s book. I was completely turned off by the website I visited. Would there be typos in the book as well? I can’t be sure. Now, I am more of a stickler than a lot of people, it’s true, but let me ask you one question. Would you take advice from a psychologist that kept crying? Would you go to a doctor who couldn’t say “surgery” correctly? Similarly, I find it hard to take advice about marketing and my profession from someone who has major typos on the homepage of a representative website. It just doesn’t work for me. Does it work for you?

Image by ilker. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ilco

 A couple of days ago, Jay Baer, who is one of my favorite social media gurus, wrote a blog called “Are you Slow Enough to Succeed in Social Media?” The article said something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Namely, Social Media is the hot new toy that everyone wants a piece of, it’s revolutionary, and EVERYBODY has to have it…but we’re not really 100% sure how it’s all going to shake down just yet. 


What you can learn from Spring


As I’m writing, it’s about 37 degrees outside and it’s raining. Not exactly what normally comes to mind when you think May, but it’s definitely the time when gardeners are really ready to get outside and get dirt under their fingernails. The thing that you learn from gardening is that you have to be patient beyond the boundaries of what life normally requires. You plant seeds and it might be a whole year till you see anything. You could have a plant for 20 years and it might not bloom till the 21st year. Despite the fact that you might not have asparagus or green beans or a beautiful hedge of roses on your first try, you keep watering and fertilizing and making sure the plant is getting enough light. You do this because you know that eventually it’s bound to pay off.


As per Baer’s blog, this is how companies really should be looking at Social Media. But it’s not how a lot of companies are looking at social media.


You say you want a revolution…


So everyone is talking about how we’re in this marketing and media revolution, but it strikes me that even though everyone agrees on this, we are still asking about ROI in the same way that we did for print or banner ads. It seems like there isn’t a whole lot of conversation regarding the fact that a revolutionary new movement in media just might require us to think about ROI very differently.


If a company has everything together, it can be fairly easy to calculate the ROI for a print or online ad. Bring the people that see your ad to a specific page with a call to action, nurture that lead, convert to customer. Well, it looks a lot easier on screen, but really, that process is feasible.


In Social Media, it simply does not work that way. First of all, what you are investing, most of the time, is not money. It’s time. It’s content. Now you could say that time is money and I suppose that would be fair, but you’re probably not paying for a “full page, 4-color profile” on Facebook or Twitter, right? So right away, the phrase “return on investment” needs to be examined more carefully. Return on what investment?


The other thing though, getting back to Baer’s blog, is that Social Media is not a 1 + 1 = 2 kind of formula. It’s about building relationships, becoming a trusted source, building the case for your brand through reliability and credibility — it’s taking the time to be human via as many digital sites as possible. 


I’ve got news for you — “leads” from Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn are not going to be people who click to a landing page and fill out a sample request form. Leads are people you’ve been talking to for six months who suddenly say, “What was that you were saying about such and such? Cuz I need help with that now.”


If you tell a boss that the projected ROI for your Social Media campaign is one strong lead over a six-month period, btw, you’ll probably not get a real big thumbs-up reaction.


I don’t know what the new ROI should be, but I think we need to catch it up to what we’re talking about elsewhere. If you’re completely changing how you relate to customers, how you relay your messaging and how you get out your content, your ROI has to change too. We’re trying to use an abacus to do rocket science right now, I think. And it’s not gonna work.

Image by Robert Proksa. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/fangol

About 3 years ago, all of the talk was about “integrated marketing.” Maintain a common aesthetic across all of your marketing channels to increase the strength of your brand.

Last year, all of the talk was about Social Media. It was a new frontier (relatively), and if there was one thing we all wanted to see last year, it was something new.

This year, “the talk” is all over the place. Is mobile marketing the new darling? Is it going to defeat Social Media? Is Google going to take over the world or is Facebook going to beat it to the punch? Is print dead or just on vacation?

Maybe it’s the pacifist in me, but I don’t think marketing is going to be about just one thing ever again. I think the companies that are really going to soar are going to be the ones who do everything and do everything well.

Chris Brogan wrote a post today where he used the phrase “Buffalo Content Maker.” The idea is that generating content for one purpose is not the most efficient way to go about things. If you have a public speaker come in to talk to your company, per Brogan’s example, why not videotape it, post it to YouTube, link back to your website, and become a resource? In Brogan’s own case, blog posts are becoming books, presentations, tweets, and more.

These are all great ideas, but they are predicated upon the fact that your key emphasis is the online world, particularly the Social Media world. I would like to see someone using a buffalo that is made of new media and yes, the horror, traditional media.

How can you do this?

Let’s jump off from a similar place to where Brogan started. Let’s say one of your customers has invited you to do a product demo at their facility. You pool your resources and get your talk ready. With you is someone to videotape the session.

When you get back, you do a little editing and post the video to YouTube. Ask your customer if you can include any questions and things they might have brought up that were good points.

Put together a little news release that you send out to the industry and post to your website. Great product demo now available. Link to the YouTube video. It’s okay not to link to your site. If they like what they see, they’ll link to your site from YouTube — a boost for SEO.

Let’s say you have a trade show coming up. Burn the video to CD, design some nice face art, and you have a give-away for the show that people won’t just throw on the floor (CDs seem more precious than sheets of paper or fliers, I’ve noticed). If you’re really feeling wild, create a direct mail piece in which the CD of the video can be inserted. Invite people to view the CD and bring their questions to your booth.

This is just one example, and not a full example, of how Social Media and the ever-changing online world can actually enrich rather than over-power tactics in which companies were engaged but a few years ago. Social Media doesn’t have to defeat traditional media and mobile marketing doesn’t have to defeat Social Media. Everything can be linked together to create a single, giant, buffalo-like chain. Use it up. The possibilities are endless.

Image by Antonio Jiménez Alonso. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Capgros