Archives for November 2010

I peeped in on #MM (Marketer Monday) chat on, well, Monday, and someone said something that caught my eye. They said, “It really makes me frustrated when I go to the trouble of scanning a QR code and I get taken to a regular old website page that I could have just typed in myself.”

Darn right.

There are a lot of really nice and shiny tools out there, but I worry that people are gravitating towards those tools without thinking about how those tools could really make a difference. “If I use this shiny tool, my marketing will be awesome,” I seem to hear. Because people and companies are so desperate to use these new tools, they are using the tools for things the tools are really not meant to do. It’s like being really excited about your new car and then trying to use the new car to make a smoothie. Car is still awesome. Functionality in the smoothie realm – negligible.

Are you:

Using Twitter to coax people onto your “sell” page

Using your blog to publish news releases

Using QR codes to take people to your homepage

Using your company’s Facebook page to post product pictures

I’m just not sure these are the best uses for these tools.  If you really want to plan something dynamic for a shiny tool like a QR code or a Twitter account, take a step back and plan it out. The tools will remain shiny while you think about how you can best use them.

Are you using tools in the best way possible? Does the shininess of the tool mean that the action is automatically new and innovative? What do you think?

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/clix

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last two weeks, and I have decided that I’m going to put #30Thursday on hiatus, at least for awhile. There are a lot of reasons for this, but primarily, it’s a time thing. I am extremely busy at work, and it’s getting to be holiday and family time, too.  Also, though, the concept has kind of evolved in a way that I didn’t think it would – it has become more “Margie’s favorite posts,” and what I was really hoping was that it would be YOUR favorite posts, or your posts, highlighted every week. The idea was to help promotion run throughout the system, and that part has kind of faded week by week, which in turn means more time 🙂

Thank you for all of the warm support you gave me each Thursday as the posts were published. It was not taken for granted at any moment, and it will not be forgotten!

You have just come up with the PERFECT, and I mean perfect, Social Media plan. Your tweets are rolling. You’re getting retweeted left and right. Your Facebook page is hopping. You could post “the sky is blue” and people would “like” your post. Your Social Media campaign was built on the idea that you are a resource for people in your industry. You’re the helpful company. You’re the company who has the knowledge and experience. You’re not out there to sell. You’re out there to help!

In all of the places where you can list a website, you link to a page that has product information, a sample request form, and a buy now button.

And yet – your sales are not going up. What is going on?

Like many things in marketing, there is a subtle art to the landing page. Yes, it’s very important to have one. There are plenty of companies that leave navigation to their website up to the internet gods. However, having a landing page just to have a place to drive traffic is not really the best approach either.

Some of the best landing pages I’ve seen out there offer the following features:

1. No Multiple Personality Disorder: If your Social Media campaign touts your company’s knowledge of the industry, don’t lead people to a page with giant yellow “buy now” starbursts. If your ads have giant yellow “buy now” starbursts, don’t lead people to a page that offers white papers written in ancient Greek. The landing page is still a part of your campaign. It needs to make sense there.

2. Talk to Me Like You Love Me: It might seem cheesy, but I think it’s really effective on a landing page to say, “Oh hi, you must have come from xyz place. Let’s continue our conversation here.” If anything, it shows that your campaign is well organized. It also takes me seamlessly from one part of your campaign to another.

3. Customize To Your Audience: We have a client who worked tirelessly with us on a very long, extremely detailed RFQ form. We thought that it was too cumbersome, but our client insisted that his customers would be all over this. Sure enough, that form comes back filled out entirely about ten times a week, sometimes more. Other audiences wouldn’t look twice at an RFQ form. Show that you value your customers by showing that you know them.

4. No Tricks: Is there anything worse than feeling like you were cheated into landing on a landing page? Well, probably, but it really stinks. Don’t dress up a scarecrow and tell me Pavarotti. Be transparent about where you’re taking people. If it’s right for them, they’ll go. If it’s not, they won’t get really cheesed off with you.

5. Give To Get: The key moral code of Social Media applies to landing pages too, no matter how you are driving traffic to them. If you want me to do something for you, do something for me. Having a white paper, a webinar, or an e-book (for free) on a landing page is a nice way to say “thanks for clicking and trusting me.”

Those are five things I’ve seen in landing pages that I think are well done. They are things we try to do when we develop landing pages for our clients. What are your five?

Image by Sean Connolly. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/SeanJC

Special note: This post is dedicated to my friend Jason Sokol, who mostly jokingly (I think) asked if I was going to offer an analysis of The Gettysburg Address. Not quite, but here is what I came up with.

The year is 1863. It’s right around this time of year, too. You are the President of the United, well, you are the President of the Union part of the United States of America. War has been raging (technically) since 1861, but really, the rift has been there for centuries. The world has been watching your country as the war has dragged on. You have been invited to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to dedicate the new national cemetery there. You are not even the main speaker. Somehow, the onus has fallen upon you to describe in a speech everything that the event means, everything the war means, everything your country means to you.

This is the scenario in which Abraham Lincoln found himself. He got up to make his speech, and just 2 minutes later, he was done. There was only a light smattering of applause. When he sat down, he told a friend that he had completely missed the mark. Different newspapers wondered how England and France viewed the Union now that it was clear how humiliating the tall, lanky president was. What a stinky speech, everyone seemed to say.

This post is already longer, in terms of words, than the Gettysburg Address. And yet, now, almost exactly 147 years later, the Gettysburg Address has become one of the American classics. “Four score and seven years ago” is an opening phrase that students have memorized for decades now. In retrospect, it seems bizarre that Lincoln wrote so many drafts of the speech – on the train to Gettysburg, in his hotel room. It seems strange that people could have been so blind as to the poignancy that he offered. It seems strange that he himself felt that he missed the mark.

There has probably been a time in your life when you worked hard on something, finessed it, polished it, started over, finessed again, only to feel that you had completely missed the mark. Maybe you wrote a blog post that you slaved over and it got no reaction. Maybe you did something at work that you thought was amazing that nobody else seemed to notice.

The thing is, you can’t always know when things are going to hit people in the way you want. Even in this age of instant communication, we are not really instantly communicating our meaning. We are just passing words back and forth. Meaning travels more slowly and is more deliberate.

What I garner from the moral of the Gettysburg Address is that all we can do is to do our best. So many of us are out here writing blog posts, tweeting, posting updates here there and everywhere. It’s kind of like emptying a huge bag of seeds onto a vast stretch of plowed fields. You don’t know what’s going to stick and bloom. You don’t know what will waft away never to be seen again. So what can you do? Make sure you are always happy with your efforts. Make sure your quality is up to your standards. Make sure your efforts are up to your standards. It might take someone 147 hours or 147 years to truly appreciate what you are doing, but if you are pleased with it yourself, the rest of it doesn’t matter.

Who knows, maybe you’ll end up in the history books of the future.

Boy have I got the job for you. Do you want to sit in a stuffy office with old strokey-beard guys playing with markers, typewriters, and pencils? Do you want to place ads in newspaper classified sections? Do you want to shmooze and be creepy?

Join the agency business!

I could be wrong, but I kind of feel like this is the pitch agencies are given to people looking for jobs. Is it really any wonder that a recent study published by Edward Boches indicates that digital talent may not gravitate towards agencies? I think not.

It seems like a lot of people view “agency” as synonymous with old, antiquated, rickety. Agencies are production houses for ads that no one wants to place, right? My friend Jeannette Baer (@myagenda) answered a quick Twitter survey I did (the question was “How do you define agency?”) and said that agencies are agents for companies, or liaisons between companies and any kind of media.

I would like to toss out another definition of agency though, one that I think would be more in line with how our agency works and what my experiences have been. I would posit that agencies are Revolution Agents.

Revolution Agents

OK, it’s really easy to say, “I’m coining a phrase.” What do I mean by this? Well, everyone is still saying that Social Media is a revolution, right? It’s turning marketing on its head, the entire way we are communicating is going through a mega-upheaval, etc etc. You’ve heard it all before.  When you have a revolution, there must be something you are revolting against. In this case, the revolution seems to be against “traditional” marketing. When people started talking about the Social Media revolution, they started talking about how: websites, advertising, SEO, publications, newspapers, books, libraries, and zombies are all dead. Or undead.

Well, being a scholar of history, I have to throw out there that revolutions are seldom able to wipe the earth clean of what is being revolted against. In fact, sometimes, like in the French Revolution, the tides turn and there’s a counter-revolution. After the American Revolution, the people wanted to name George Washington our first king. Uh wha?

I’m not calling for a counter-revolution here, but I’m saying that there is some ground between the allegedly antiquated world of how things were five years ago and the allegedly brand new world that exists now. Agencies are the best equipped to walk you through that no-man’s land and build a bridge. They are Revolution Agents.

There are two ways I can explain this concept. One is by using the brilliant Confederate Calvary man, Jeb Stuart. The other is to use the Panama Canal.

Jeb Stuart

Perhaps one of the most famous battles of the Civil War was fought in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. If you’ve ever been there, it seems, still, like the least likely place for there to be massive warfare. Although I’ll grant you that there were probably far fewer wax museums in 1863, little has changed in terms of the feel of the town. The battle is also famous because Robert E. Lee made a series of mistakes that ended up with him ordering Picket’s charge. That didn’t go so well, and the battle pretty much marked the end of the war for the Confederacy, though the war raged on for another 2 years.

One of the reasons that Robert E. Lee was so off his game during this battle is that Jeb Stuart had not done what he was supposed to. You see, Stuart had the capability to ride around armies, scout out the whole scene, and then report back to Lee what the enemy was up to, what kinds of numbers there were, things like that. Well, as Lee headed up to Pennsylvania through Maryland, he and Stuart got separated by too wide a distance, and Lee went into the battle blind.

For all of the companies who are entering into the world of Social Media because someone says they have to, or for all of the companies who are refraining from engaging in Social Media because someone says they have to, I suggest to you that you need a Jeb Stuart. You need someone who can ride around, sniff out what’s going on in all different directions, report back to you, and then help you implement a plan of attack.

An agency can be your Jeb Stuart. Because we are involved in so much (that’s right, we don’t just create ads and place them), we have the pulse of a lot of what is going on in the marketing world. We can tell you about things we are encountering that we think might work for you, and then we can help you move forward with a campaign. We can help you navigation this crazy “is dead” versus “is changing forever” environment.

The Panama Canal

The other way that agencies can serve as Revolution Agents is by serving as a link between the old world and the new world. We do not hide the fact that we still are involved in media buying. We place online ads, we place print ads. And in fact, in talking to a recent contact of ours, it turns out that 85% of people polled about receiving an electronic-only copy of his company’s publication said, “Well, that’s okay, we’d like to receive print please.” For us, print is not dead, it is merely changing.

We also don’t hide the fact that we are always educating ourselves as much as possible about website development, SEO, public relations, trade shows (virtual and real life), marketing materials like brochures, catalogs, and sell sheets, QR Codes, Augmented Reality publications, and yes, Social Media.

Right now, it seems like a lot of people believe that you can’t get from 1 world to the other. It seems like it’s as hard as it was getting from the Atlantic to the Pacific before the Panama Canal opened for business. You have to go well out of your way, it’s dangerous, it’s costly, and it just doesn’t seem feasible. Well, like the Panama Canal, we can make that transition from one world to the other seamless. We can guide your ship back and forth and even help you carry some of that Pacific Ocean water over into the Atlantic. We like to mix up our oceans (and our metaphors).

It’s easy to believe that agencies are advertising, advertising is print, print is dead, and therefore agencies are dead or dying. For some agencies, this might be true. If you are just a production house, you are in HUGE trouble. But agencies have a chance to completely redefine what the word “agency” means. And for folks who are in college or grad school, for those with “digital talent,” for those who are looking for a new and exciting job, I would say to you that there is no need to recreate the wheel. You could make a huge difference by using your expertise to bring an agency into the role of a Revolution Agent. What could be more exciting than that?

Does this make sense to you? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

1st Image by Faakhir Rizvi. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/fakhar

I have been a Civil War nut, or actually a history nut, for as long as I can remember. One of my favorite books when I was just learning how to read was about famous Native American chiefs. I truly fell in love with the Civil War from the moment I first learned about it though. Perhaps it was because my family and I traveled to places like Antietam when I was a kid, so it all seemed more real and easier to envision.

Studying the Civil War over the course of a lifetime is like having a favorite book or movie that you keep coming back to. Every time I read a book, every time I watch Ken Burns’ series, every time I think about the events of that whole time period, I learn something new about what is going on in the world now.

My brother got me the DVD set of the Ken Burns Civil War series for my birthday a couple of months ago, and I find that I am completely transfixed by it. I am hypnotized by Shelby Foote’s tales and his glistening eyes. I am enveloped in thought as I try to imagine if we could ever travel down those awful paths again. But I also find that very new thoughts are coming into my head. The series focuses a great deal on the struggle Abraham Lincoln had in finding the right kind of general, and I think looking at his generals can be highly instructive for anyone, whether for marketing or for life. So here is what I think we can learn from Lincoln’s random assortment of generals. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Winfield Scott: Winfield Scott represents to me an example of someone who tries to get by on past successes. During the Mexican War, Scott was a great hero. He had made a name for himself as a great general in that war. You would think that he would have been a great asset by the time the Civil War came along, but instead, Scott had become so overweight he couldn’t mount a horse. He represents what happens when you get too much applause and take it too much to heart. When new opportunities come, you will not be ready. You will still be living in your triumphant past.

Henry W. Halleck: Halleck is often described as a very administrative sort of leader. He was a paperwork kind of fellow. But what Halleck represents to me is jealousy. Early in the war, when US Grant first started winning victories for the Union side, Halleck became envious. He spread rumors about Grant. After Shiloh, even though Grant won the battle, Halleck removed him because the victory had been too costly – or at least that was Halleck’s version of the story. It seems incomprehensible that people on the same team would undercut each other so, and yet we live in such a competitive society these days that it seems difficult to promote ourselves while also applauding others.

George McClellan: I would love to see a psychologist write about McClellan. He was almost unmatched when it came to raising self-esteem, setting the groundwork for success, earning the love and respect of those who needed to follow him, and testing those whom he led. He became so loved so early on for his training of the Army of the Potomac that he wrote home to his wife and said, “I feel like I could be a dictator, but I don’t want to be one, so I won’t be a dictator.” The guy was convinced that he was Napoleon reincarnated. And yet, for all of that, he couldn’t execute. He lashed out at those who asked him to implement his plans. He built demons that prevented him from moving. There is so much we can learn there. We can learn that sometimes timidity is more dangerous that bravery. We can learn that ego can be the enemy of success. We can learn the value of tangible research to balance whatever our minds come up with as the new reality.

US Grant: One might think that the only things we could learn from Grant would be good things. However, Grant’s life is primarily a story of failure, and even after his victorious run as general, he died in poverty after one of the most corrupted presidencies in American history. Why did this happen? Sherman once said of Grant that Grant doesn’t really take note of what’s happening around him. Another famous quote is that Grant always looks like he’s going to have to break a wall of brick with his head. Grant was pragmatic. He won during the Civil War because he knew lots and lots of men would have to die, and he was willing to sacrifice them. He was not after glory. He just wanted to end the war. He wanted to be on the winning side. So he plowed ahead. In today’s world this can be particularly dangerous. Grant’s later presidency exemplifies this. He did not take note of what was happening around him. Had he done so, he might have been able to dampen some of the larger scandals that ended up blackening his name.

How can we apply these lessons to the business world?

So what can these strange men teach us about marketing? Here are some questions to ask yourself.

• Are you avoiding trying something new because what you have always done worked just fine?

• Are you assuming you are still in fine shape because you are doing what succeeded for you five years ago?

• Are you working in an environment of silos where only one person or one department receives credit for success?

• Are you letting your personal ambitions get in the way of team success?

• Are you refraining from trying new things because you’re just sure something awful would happen?

• Are you plowing ahead without noting what your competitors and customers are doing around you?

Of the men listed above, only Grant could really proclaim himself successful. However, none of the other men saw so many of their men die on the battlefield as Grant did.

What kind of campaign are you waging? What kind of general are you?