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Archives for July 2010

My open letter to LeBron: It’s not just business. It’s personal.

by Margie Clayman

Dear Mr. James (Your Highness),

You said last night that when you awoke yesterday morning, you knew your decision. When I woke up this morning, the first thing that popped into my head was a scene from the movie You’ve Got Mail. Tom Hanks’ character, who owns a huge book store meant to be something like Barnes & Noble, moves down the street from Meg Ryan’s tiny little family-owned book store. She knows it will destroy her business, but he says, “It’s just business. It’s not personal.” “It is personal,” she says. “It’s personal to me.”

 LeBron, the decision you made may have been business for you and your “team.” It may be business to Miami. It may be business for LA and New York and Chicago.

It is not business to us here in Northeast Ohio. It is personal.

We know the areas where you used to roam as a kid. A poor kid who was lucky enough to get guidance from people around you. Akron people. We know the shelter that helped out your mom, a shelter, by the way, that is having a hard time providing service to women like your mom today because their funds have been slashed and burned. We drive by your school, LeBron, where your first chapter of dreams came true. We went to those games and we thought, “Could this really be happening here?” We watched one of our own get signed to our basketball team, our poor Cavs, who were best known for crinkling up like aluminum foil as Michael Jordan hit “the shot.”

Our Cavs, by the way, are now known as the team that suffered most from “the decision.”

Do you remember when you were a kid and the Goodyear blimp would fly overhead? It’s something all of us Akron people get excited about. Back when you were a little kid, the blimp was called The Spirit of Akron. It would show up on television, soaring above games. It would fly over our houses and we would soar up there in the clouds in the Spirit of Akron’s wake.

A few years ago, the name of the blimp changed. It was the Spirit of Goodyear. All of our ties to that little bubble of air were broken after years of gazing upward.

You were our new spirit of Akron, LeBron. You were our proof that good things can happen here. Good things can come from here. You made people familiar with a side of Akron that had nothing to do with all of the jokes and mockery. You were putting us on the map in a good way, LeBron. And in these really dark economic times, when businesses and stores are closing, when our libraries and schools are dying here, LeBron, you gave us something to look forward to, something to be really proud of.

When I was 25 I felt the big 3-0 pushing down on me. I had goals I wanted to reach by age 30, and I felt like I would be a failure if I didn’t meet all of those objectives. Granted, I didn’t have the spotlight on me like you do, but I’ll tell you something that you come to appreciate after you get through your twenties. You appreciate your community. You appreciate being surrounded by places and people who have been there for you your whole life. That’s not to say that people always come back to where they’re from, but you start getting nostalgic. You will miss that in Miami. It will never be home to you. But because of the way you handled this, I’m not sure your emotional home here, your spiritual home, will be waiting for you.

You said last night that winning has always been the most important thing to you. It broke my heart that you couldn’t say that winning in Miami would be less sweet than it would have been to win a championship for your hometown. You will learn, eventually, that winning a championship is not enough to fulfill you, LeBron. And winning can mean different things. To us, your hometown crowd, winning would have been taking less money, as you are willing to do, and saying that you would stay with us till you brought a championship home. That is the true definition of loyalty. Saying that you don’t care how hurt the fans are, saying that you hope we treat you with respect, is like spitting in all of our faces, LeBron. How could you?

You always say that you are a big fan of the Yankees. So you probably know all about Lou Gehrig and the amazing speech he made when he had to retire. Lou Gehrig was from New York. He started out in tough circumstances but found that sports gave him a way out. He got to play for his home team, and he stayed there. You could say that it was easier for him to stay because the Yankees won. Maybe. But I think Lou Gehrig valued the reward of playing in front of his family, his friends, and all of the people that cheered him on from the very beginning. He wasn’t the luckiest man in the world, at the beginning of a crippling disease, because he had won championships. He was the luckiest man in the world, LeBron, because he had forged a powerful bond with his fans, with his teammates, and with history. That is a winner.

Business is not always something that is without emotion. Decisions cannot always be made separate from the results. The way you handled this process, the way you announced this, the way you so rapidly “moved on” last night, away from Cleveland, away from your home, and towards a city that only knows you as “the king,” may have all been good for your franchise. But when you retire, when your boys are ready to go to high school and college, when they want to see where your glory days were spent, where they were born, you will have to explain how and why that all ended. And that’s why I’m not angry with you, LeBron. You might not see the ramifications of your actions now. You might win 15 championships. You might become the King of Miami. But eventually you will have to explain to yourself and your boys and your grandkids that you left the hometown that you claimed to love because of business reasons, because it’s what the 25-year-old you thought would make you happy.

Good luck with that, LeBron.

Filed Under: Musings

It’s not just integrated marketing. It’s integrating marketing.

by Margie Clayman

There was a TREMENDOUS conversation in which I got to participate last evening on Twitter. Marsha Collier runs a weekly chat on customer service (#custserv for you Twitter users). Last night the topic was basically the relationship between marketing and customer service. The conversation, for me, solidified a thought that had just been ranging around my brain before. To wit: customer service and marketing need each other to succeed.

This also made me realize something new. “Integrated Marketing” may officially be an out-of-date term. It’s not just about integrating your marketing channels anymore, is it? Now, on a corporate level, marketing must be integrated with customer service. The one can enhance the other, and if not planned carefully, one can easily detract from the other as well.

How can a company weave together strands of customer service with strands of marketing to make a fully functional tapestry? Here are some ideas.

1. Build on testimonials: The easiest relationship to identify between marketing and customer service is a positive reaction from a customer. A testimonial, essentially, is a customer singing a company’s praises. Marketing can spread the word about this happiness, build credibility, and show that the company really does walk the walk rather than just talking the talk. It’s tangible proof of strong customer service.

2. Make customer service a pillar of your marketing campaign: If the customer service folk have really been kicking it into gear, don’t be afraid to capitalize on that strength. Market it, in other words. Talking about strong customer service is great for booth graphics at a show, a company profile, and more. Market your strengths.

3. From the fertilizer of a customer service mistake, make marketing flowers bloom: Everyone by now has probably heard the story of Comcast Cares. A company notorious for poor customer service used Social Media to become responsive, attentive, and the poster child of modern-day communication. If a mistake can be fixed, if an unhappy customer can become an “evangelizer” for your company or product, your marketing team can have a veritable field day. If that person is willing to be quoted in an ad, a press release, or serve as an ambassador for your company at a trade show or event, how credible will that person AND you seem? This company isn’t perfect and I wasn’t always happy, but look at how happy I am now!

4. Marketing should keep existing customers in mind: Research shows that people like to think that someone is listening. Even with all of these ways to share content, feedback is what people are really after. If customer service gets several similar complaints about a feature and that feature is changed or updated, make sure marketing knows about it. “We listened and our product is better thanks to you.” Domino’s Pizza recently carried this kind of campaign out using television commercials tied to a Social Media campaign. Keep everyone in the loop!

5. Customer Service should keep marketing in mind: One thing we always try to tell people we work with is that it is essential to find out how people find out about you. If someone calls or emails or visits your website and expresses an interest in your product, don’t be shy about asking how they heard about you. Marketers don’t get a whole lot of gold stickers, but a delivered lead is pure gold indeed. Keep track of what people say and let your marketing team know what’s going on. The marketing plan can be shifted to emphasize what is performing well.

Are there other ways in which customer service and marketing are or could be intertwined? Let me know!

Image by Glenn Pebley. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/GlennPeb

Filed Under: Marketing Talk

What is this Blogging thing?

by Margie Clayman

Well hello there, trusty readers! Sorry for the lag in posting. Truthfully, I have been on vacation! Had a lovely time in Cape Cod & Boston. I know, I know. I should have let you all know, but true to my word, I don’t believe in broadcasting to the world that I’m leaving my home abandoned. WHAT is wrong with me!?! 🙂 Anyway, due to various factors such as the stress of travel and lack of sleep caused by watching the Boston fireworks extravaganza Sunday night, I was not able to stay awake for my favorite Twitter chat, Blog chat. It looks like I missed quite a doozie!

To get caught up, I read this excellent post by Ian M. Rountree. The main topic of the chat, and hence of Ian’s post, is “voice” in blogging. But it seems like what happened is that a conversation about what Blogging is at heart blossomed. Is a blog something that should be written anonymously? If you have multiple people from your company blogging, should you broadcast that? Is Blogging writing? Is writing Blogging?

All of these questions are both important and thought-provoking. They inspired me to ask myself what I think Blogging is, or what I set out to do with my Blog(sssss). After some heavy mental lifting, here’s where I am on the whole thing.

Blogging is a series of conversations aimed at one central goal

If you think about the Three Musketeers, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For me, it’s “One for all, all for one.” And oddly enough, that’s what I think of when I think about a Blog. The “all” can be you and your readers, it can be you and your co-bloggers, or a combination. But the central core of the issue is that you are all generally interested in the same types of things, the same types of goals, and you want to share your opinions and anything you might have learned. That’s a recipe for a conversation, right?

So while I was sleeping soundly (and I do mean soundly), folks on Twitter were debating how to approach a multi-person or team blog. Based on my perception of a Blog as a conversation, I would say the following:

1. Be transparent. Let people see different perspectives, different voices, and let them attribute those characteristics appropriately.

2. Before you put virtual pen to digital paper, have a plan. What is the “one” that you are all for? No matter who is writing and no matter what each individual’s particular spin may be, a person visiting the Blog should not be confused at any point about what the conversation is about.

3. To show that there is an underlying sense of teamwork and cohesiveness, be interactive with your team members. Comment on each others’ blogs, comment on comments for a post you haven’t written, etc.

4. Don’t try to out-do each other. Blogging is not about ego, I don’t care who says otherwise! If one of your team members seems to get more comments than you, don’t worry about it. Maybe people respond more to their posts but read your posts and think more deeply about them.

5. Make sure you make accessible a link where your individual voices really do become one. This could be a link to your website or even a link to a Facebook page. Conversations are great, but they might distract someone who is just looking for straightforward information.

A quick PS

I do NOT think that a multi-voice Twitter account is a good idea. On Twitter you have so little room to make big connections with people that leaving doubt as to who is talking can be deadly. I recommend the way Dell does it, for example – include some corporate prefix or suffix (or name) in your handle, then personalize so everyone has a separate but related account.

Filed Under: Marketing Talk

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