Archives for June 2010

Do you like to do Yoga? Have you ever done Yoga? I’m in quite a Yoga phase right now. All different kinds. Some Rodney Yee, some Suzanne Deason, even some Biggest Loser Yoga (ouch). One of the great things about Yoga is that the advice and steps you take during a work-out can carry through to the rest of your day. It is not so surprising, then, that I realized that marketers could also benefit from some Yoga wisdom. Don’t worry — you won’t be doing any physical stretches here. It’s all in your head

Find Your Center

At the beginning of a lot of Yoga work-outs, you are advised to find your center while standing evenly on your two feet. For a marketer, finding your center means squarely standing on your two feet, which are knowledge and experience. Do not be swayed too much by what others are saying or doing. Listen, but remain conscious of what you want to achieve and what you want to accomplish. Keep your eyes on your goals, and if your knowledge and experience plant you in a way that is unique, all the better.

Breathe

No matter what kind of Yoga you are doing, you will hear an emphasis on breathing. Breathe in deeply, exhale out tension and toxins. Even while you are asking your body to stretch its limits, your mind works on concentrating on how your breath goes in and out. For a marketer, breathing is actually important physically. The world is a stressful place, and at least for me, I only realize how shallow my breaths get when I sit down and actually try to take deep breaths. But a marketer can also concentrate on internal rhythms, goals, objectives, and desires while working on everyday tasks, while building a foundation, while going to meetings and/or conferences. This kind of approach — concentrating on one thing in the foreground while in the background you are working on something else — is behind many ideas that are floating out there today.

Stay balanced

There isn’t a lot you can do in Yoga that doesn’t require some amount of balance. Similarly, there isn’t a lot a marketer can do that doesn’t require some balance, and I don’t mean just the bottom line. Are you balancing your online, offline, and Social Media campaigns appropriately? Are you balancing your time in promoting yourself versus promoting others? Are you balancing your time in completing tasks the regular way while learning all the time how to do things in new ways?

Turn things upside down

One of the more common poses in Yoga is called Downward Facing Dog. Your head is down, your legs are stretched back. The idea is that turning upside down will release toxins and stress. For a marketer, turning things upside down can shine the light on a new way to approach things. But upside down is also a good way to think about how a marketer can construct a campaign. We all know the ultimate goal: sell something. What is the last step before the sale? How do you get to that step? And the one before that?

Honor your body

Finally, a lot of Yoga instructors remind you to honor your body. Sometimes it makes you feel kind of bad. The instructor may be leaning backwards to reach his or her ankles and you are lucky to reach back even a little. But you are told to honor your body and its restrictions. The same holds true for marketers. Not everyone can do what the great gurus of marketing do, especially not at first. If you can’t do the full pose in Yoga, you find an adaptation. The same holds true for marketers. If you don’t think you have enough content for a weekly Blog, start with a monthly or quarterly e-newsletter, or start with comments. If you just can’t seem to master a certain skill, accept that limitation. Not everyone can turn themselves into a human pretzel. Trying can result in serious pain. The same holds true for marketing. Do not extend beyond what you are comfortable doing. The result will not be favorable.

Do you have a hobby that feeds your soul and also carries you through your profession? I’d love to hear about it!

Image by Aaron Neifer. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/knife18

I saw a post the other day by Julien Smith (I know, it’s like I’m a one-track mind lately) about how hard it is to build a following on Twitter. For relative noobs like me this was great news. However, it released a Hulk-like amount of frustration that I’ve just been waiting to vent about Twitter. So here we go. My top 15 Twitter pet peeves.

1. Balance is not a rule on Twitter. If you look around, most of the people who have 500,000 followers are only following 1-2 people. Conan O’Brien is a great example of this – when the Twitter “follower” feed was hacked, it became noticeable when Conan seemed to actually be following people. So what is this about, Tweet prophets? I get why you can’t follow everyone who follows you, but really? 1-2% of the people following you, if that, are worth you following?

2. I was under the impression that Twitter is a social network. I think this is slightly misleading. I have encountered people on Twitter that you could retweet, tweet, mention, or whatever else all day long and they still would not give a reply back. It is called SOCIAL media, right? Deodorant and teeth brushing aren’t problems, so what gives?

3. People who #talk in #hashtags for no #good reason annoy the heck out of me. Talk English. I don’t speak in pound symbols. And if your sentence doesn’t really have to do with any of the 20 topics you just tagged, it’s not going to help you either, right?

4. I find it both creepy and irritating when someone retweets your post because of a word you used rather than because of what you actually said. I retweeted an article about how Nancy Pelosi said that her policy is based on The Word. I got “mentioned” by JesusNews. Eh?

5. A person you are following can direct message you. When you go to reply, it won’t work if they aren’t following you. Do you know how frustrating it can be to try to send a direct message back only to find that you, well, can’t, because you’re not being followed? If you’re going to send me a direct message, can’t you follow me?

6. The self-promotion on Twitter is terrible. I’m guilty of this one to a degree because I drive traffic to this blog using my tweets. However, I never once have said, “Come see my brilliant post.” I try to lure people in to this here sticky goo based on subject matter. I find it misleading when someone tweets, “Oh, a really interesting concept” and then it’s their blog. I feel cheated!

7. 9 times out of 10, logging into Twitter does not work. ‘Nuff said.

8. Twitter perpetually seems like a personal cocktail party that you are eavesdropping on. I do not want to be privy to what you and your friends are planning to do, or what you and your friends did, or what you and your friends thought about what you did. Even if you’re famous. Well, maybe not that last part, but still…

9. Foursqure. Oh foursquare. You are the thorn in my side, the weight on my shoulders, the…well, you get the idea. People thought tweets were banal before. Now you can find out when your contacts are working out, when they’re following that up by a trip to the bar, and when they have become mayor of a furniture store. Ay caramba.

10. Trending Topics. I read an article the other day about whether Twitter had the right to remove Justin Bieber from trending topics and whether trending topics are worthwhile anyway. Short answer: no, no they’re not. Right now, at this minute, four of the trending topics have hearts in them. One of those also has the word Bieber. Another trending topic right now: Ghetto Spelling Bee. Really? I mean…really?

11. The quoters are just awful on Twitter. Now some people have done a good job with it. I know a lot of people who follow “Tiny Buddha,” which is a good use of Twitter. But I followed a guy for awhile and ALL he did was alternate quotes by other people with links about ex-girlfriends. Creepy. And yet his handle indicated that he would be talking about useful info. I kept waiting…

12. If you are a grammarian, you should probably avoid Twitter. I can’t tell you how many tweets I see that say, “Retweet if your single” or “Their the bad guys.” Move away from the computer, drop the chalupa, and learn the difference between your and you’re, their, they’re, and their, and many other troublesome word sets. Duhrive. Me. Crazeh.

13. How does a person with 1 tweet get 100,000 followers? This would seem to argue against Smith’s case that it’s hard to get followers. I remain perplexed.

14. People pretending to be celebrities. This was a major problem with Myspace. For fun, once, I followed five accounts pretending to be one of my favorite actresses. I don’t think any of them noticed. It was funny. But kind of creepy. People need to get lives.

15. People who post the same thought over and over again in different ways also annoy me. Yes, I notice. I’m not living in the movie Memento. Yet. Move on to your next winning thought, please.

So there you have it. My 15 least favorite things about Twitter. What are yours?

So I finished chapter two of Trust Agents. The chapter is about “making your own game.” Brogan and Smith give a lot of examples how to do this, and they expertly use the analogy of “hacking” a game to improve your experience. They also reference, often, Gary Vaynerchuk, who created The Wine Library. I really liked this chapter for about 80% of the time I was reading it. I am all about trying to put a new spin on things. If I were an architect, I’d probably always want to put additions on to a perfectly fine house. Motivational stuff. I dig it.

But then…I got to the last few pages, which talk about “hacking” at work. And I have to raise my hand (because I can’t raise my eyebrow) and say, to quote a cowboy, “Woah.”

[Read more…] about The downside of making your own game

When it comes to the news, I generally have become a “hide my head in the sand” kind of person. When Brian Williams or Jim Lehrer warns me that the following scenes may be graphic, I turn the channel. Most of the time.

I make a few exceptions when I think it is necessary. One of the most gut-wrenching things I have ever seen was the families looking for loved ones after 9/11. Then there was the documentary that Jules and Gedeon Naudet put together. I felt obligated to watch these things.

Ever since the rig explosion in the Gulf, I’ve not just buried my head, but I’ve been covering it with some kind of mixture of mental block, a touch of denial, and maybe some concrete. I really have no stomach for suffering, and when it’s animals, who have no real voice, I just can’t deal with it. When it’s suffering caused by greed, stupidity, and ineptitude, it’s all just a little too much. However, yesterday some pictures finally surfaced of suffering birds, and I felt that sense of obligation again. This is something I need to remember. This is something I’m going to need to tell people about 50 years from now. I need to remember.

It’s not just the animals

Of course, I’m not ignorant of the fact that people are already being deeply affected by what’s going on here. Fishermen, the seafood industry, tourism — tons of jobs. Suffering people on the way. Then I think about the Pointe Aux Chenes, who have born witness to American cruelty before. They were pushed to the very edges of our country, to the marshlands of Louisiana, and now, guess whose land is being soaked in the slick of greed and stupidity? And I wonder about things we aren’t even talking about yet. For example:

1. How many generations must we wait till fish & seafood affected by the spill is definitely safe to eat again?

2. If the oil does indeed reach all the way up to the Atlantic, how will we possibly be able to track the effects of all of the sludge and chemicals floating out there?

3. Who will monitor these things? We can’t even keep cadmium out of Shrek glasses.

Isn’t there all this talk about crisis PR?

So as a marketer, I’m looking at all of this, and then I see a full page ad for BP in the Wall Street Journal. As Jay Baer points out in his brilliant Blog on the subject, the ad does not apologize. It’s basically going through the motions. Now, as a media buyer and as a person rather familiar with media pricing, I happen to know that an ad like that is worth some serious change.

Maybe if the ad DID include even the slightest sense of guilt or apology, I wouldn’t be so steamed. However, it really doesn’t. So steamed I am.

There are a lot of things that could have been done with the some $50 million that BP has spent on these kind of pointless ads. Maybe they could have used the ad to ask people to donate to a special clean-up fund. Maybe they could have shared the space with the National Wildlife Federation. Maybe they could have given it to me so I could have purchased $50 million worth of dish soap to help clean up the suffocating birds. Really. That’s what I would use it for right now.


Why be mad at BP?

In response to a lot of the “Boycott BP” talk out there, people are saying that BP is really, sadly, no better or worse than any other oil & gas company. And besides, boycotting the corporation will only, per usual, hurt people who are not to blame, like your local BP franchise manager. I’ve been trying to turn my attention to the National Wildlife Fund, who is asking people to spread the word via Social Media. Social Media which is, by the way, generally free.

I’m not saying that advertising in a crisis is bad policy. But the lesson here is that if you are, say, destroying a national treasure and an entire ecosystem at the same time, you might want to hold out on the “we’re working on it” ad campaign until that money has been used to clean up the mess. In this particular case, advertising made BP’s situation worse, not better.

Image from MSNBC.

I was watching Avinash Kaushik’s webinar on multi-channel analytics today and saw a question pop up regarding whether ROI can be figured out based on analytics. The marketing world and those who use marketing are increasingly obsessed with trackability, and that makes sense. Money is tight everywhere. If you spend money, you want to know it was worth it. There is no doubt that programs like Google Analytics are amazing, and with advice from experts like Kaushik, it’s becoming more and more feasible to look at an ad campaign or a webinar, compare it to your website’s traffic, and learn from your triumphs and/or your tribulations. It’s great. It’s geeky. It’s even fun. But there’s a big but.

Analytics is not ROI. Or is it?

I think the definition of ROI has gotten a little bit fuzzy, and I think this is an increasingly dangerous problem. Why? Well, marketers can drive traffic to your website. Marketers can tell you how many people visited your site, what pages they visited, and if you have an e-commerce site, you can learn who bought what, too. However, a marketer can NOT force people to buy your product. And that’s a really really REALLY important distinction that often gets lost in the shuffle.

Now, some companies might define “ROI” as how many clicks back to their website they receive. In that case, analytics and ROI could be synonymous. However, there might well be a disconnect between sales and marketing in that scenario. Ultimately, it’s not visits to a website that pays the bills, as we all know.

The other danger in tying analytics and ROI so closely together is that even though the science of analytics is getting better and better every day, it is still very difficult to pinpoint where a sale comes from unless you actually ask. Kaushik talked about this in the webinar today. If you run ads in the same publication 2 months in a row, and the first month your traffic spikes while in the second month your traffic dives, does that mean the ad lost its power in 30 days? If your sales spike six months later, can you attribute it to randomness or the fact that people held on to your ad or your e-newsletter and thought of you when the need arose?

Analytics Sets the Table. ROI Cooks the Meal.

I like to think of analytics as if it were a butler making sure that everything is just so before a big dinner. Is your traffic strong? Is it going to the places you want it to go to? What’s your bounce rate? ROI is the meal. It’s the show. And while a person could analyze a cost per click for an ad campaign or an e-newsletter, ROI is not so easy. Analytics is important because it shows whether you are giving yourself a chance to get your Return on Investment. ROI is what comes after those clicks turn into customers.

ROI is just going to become more mysterious

We thought it was hard to pinpoint ROI when we were dealing with print programs, website development, and trade shows. Guess what’s going to be even harder? Calculating ROI for a Social Media campaign. Here are just some of the questions involved.

1. Is my investment time? Whose time? What is that time worth? Is that time worth the same when responding to a tweet or updating a Facebook status?

2. Is my investment the salary of my brand new, shiny Social Media manager? If so, how can I determine if that person is performing well? Will it be based on likes, follows, retweets?

3. If a person buys from your company after seeing a YouTube video you had posted a year before, do you calculate that as ROI for the cost of developing that video, or is just bonus points for the new year?

Analytics will still work. You’ll be able to see that person who clicked to your site from Facebook. You’ll be able to track the success of your videos, too. But that ROI is just a different animal. It’s wild and crazy. We need to cage it up, identify it, agree on that identification, and make it our friend. Because whether you’re a marketer or VP of sales and marketing at your company, you’re going to get asked to prove the success of a campaign based on the ROI. Explaining that it’s a wiggly worm just isn’t going to cut it. We can all agree on that.

Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ilco

I’ve noticed something about business folk. We are a boastful bunch. We are all about case studies, testimonials, retweets, recommendations, comments, “likes,” and providing the proof that one can find in the pudding of our success.

I’m not knocking this facet of the business world. Business is competitive. You need to prove you do stuff better. I get that. However, I would also toss out there that I tend to sort of skim-read testimonials and case studies. Okay, you did this, you made money, now you’re telling me about it. I am very happy for you, I am humbled, nay blinded by your success and intellect. Ho-hum.

Where are the humans?

As much as a person can learn from someone else’s success, I find that I tend to remember bloopers a little bit better. I mean, when you watch a television show, for example, you take for granted that everything is going to run smoothly, no one is going to forget their lines. That particular part of the project doesn’t stick out. Of course it’s great. These are professionals. But when you see a gag reel or bloopers? Man, that stuff sticks with me forever. It shows that the actors are human, that they are maybe of this planet. I think marketing could benefit from the same thing.

Now, there is an inherent risk in this, which is that you don’t want to look dumb. But from my perspective, the world is pretty chock-full of experts who seemingly attained rock star status almost accidentally. I would love to hear about the mistakes that they learned from along the way. The bloopers.

Mistakes have legs

One of the things we preach to our clients is that case studies and testimonials have legs. You can use video testimonials as a multi-media dimension to your website or to your Social Media campaign. Testimonials are tremendous fodder for ads, e-blasts, and just about everything else. But I’m going to toss out there the idea that mistakes, or anti-case studies, could have legs, too. How? Why?

1. Mistakes are things people can easily relate to. They might be in the middle of the same exact mess you already experienced. If you can help them feel like they are not alone in their blunder AND that there is a way out, you will very likely earn their eternal admiration.

2. Admitting you can and do make mistakes makes you more credible, at least to me. I can’t really relate to these experts who talk about the fact that they fell out of bed and ended up with 10,000,000 Twitter followers. But if you tell me that you started a Twitter account, had 17 followers for 5 months and then started growing your base…that I’m interested in. I want to know how you did that.

3. People are in to feeling like they are the smartest people in the world, and it’s not hard to make yourself feel that way. With sites like Wikipedia and heck, with the fact that we can get people to not only LIKE us but to FOLLOW us, I think all of us are getting a bit of an ego problem. I think the idea of the case study may get overshadowed at some point by the fact that people don’t necessarily want to know why what you did was great. They want to know either how to fix the one problem they can’t fix or how you can help them.

Psst…the anti-case study can actually be a case study

Okay, so here’s the neat part about this concept of the anti-case study. You can actually redeem yourself and create a believable, credible, realistic, easy to understand case study. Imagine, for example, if BP not only stops the oil gushing into our treasured wetlands but also manages, some centuries down the road, to redeem themselves. Wouldn’t you want to know how they did that? And if they came out strong with how-to lessons on how to prevent another disaster like this, that PR would practically write itself. Become environmentalists, BP. Save the planet, save yourselves.

Tell me what you did wrong. Tell me how you fixed it. Let me use you as an example of how someone can get into a bind but then climb right out. It’s a lot more interesting than retweeting a post or 5 from Mr. or Mrs. DoNoWrong.

Image by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/jarpur