Archives for November 2010

It seems like a lot of people find it very easy to badmouth agencies, or the concept of “the agency.” I am not really sure why this is. I suppose enough people have had enough bad experiences that it has kind of morphed into an acceptable view of things. Maybe it’s misdirected fury at the “advertising game,” which makes many feel squeamish. Anyway, pretty much on a daily basis I find myself defending agencies. It makes me mad.

Just like with any group of people, there are agencies that are bad. They give bad advice. They cut and run. They don’t listen. They are irresponsible with money and or information. But let me tell you a little bit about our agency. Because when you say you don’t like agencies, you’re saying you don’t like where I work. You’re saying you don’t like what I and my family sacrifice many things and much time for. I think you should know what you are really talking about.

Our agency can be trusted with any information. Our clients know that they can send us any information and it will not leave our office walls.

Our agency requires authorization to do anything on our clients’ behalf. We do this so that there is never any question about how we are using our clients’ investment in us.

Our agency puts our heart and soul into spec work, knowing that at times it might result in a new relationship, while at other times the work may go elsewhere.

Our agency cares about our clients as people. We mourn with them. We celebrate with them. We are human beings.

Our agency builds relationships with vendors so that we can provide the most holistic services possible, creating a “one stop shop” for our clients.

Our agency never rests on our laurels. We don’t call ourselves “the experts” or “the gurus.” Rather, we are always learning, and we are always trying to pass on what we learn so that it can most  benefit our clients.

Our agency believes that service, good service, comes first.

When you say, “I’m not a fan of agencies” or “Oh, stupid agencies,” you are talking about our agency, too. There are probably many other agencies who, like us, believe that this is a service business where the customer’s trust is a treasure and where the customer’s success is the only thing that can make an agency successful.

I am proud of what I do. I am proud of the quality that our agency has come to represent for close to sixty years now. I am proud of my family for making that happen.

Do some agencies deserve a bad rap? I’m sure they do. But if you can’t narrow it down to specifics, I’d ask you to pause before painting with a big broad brush of bashing.

I see this question come up almost every week during blogchat. Throughout the week, a lot of people also ask me why I blog every day, and is that something that everyone should do.

The easiest answer to give is that whatever you choose to do, you should try to be consistent. Create an expectation with your readership. I think one of the best things that could happen to a blogger would be for a reader to say, “Aw, you usually have your blog up by this time. Where is it?” If you don’t blog every day, create a general day and time so that your readership can come to expect a blog. If you do things right, they and you will look forward to that consistent “date.”

The answer really goes beyond this matter of consistency though and extends to the kind of blog you want to have. Ask yourself what you want to give you readers, and ask what you are hoping to get out of the experience. Once I found my voice for blogging, I knew that I wanted my blog to be a place of conversation about things having to do with marketing (and sometimes loosely related things like life and the world). I seldom get into details because that’s not generally how I talk. I’m not a big stats person, I’m not a big reader of case studies, so that’s not the kind of thing I talk about here. This means that it’s easier for me to post a blog a day. It’s easy for me to talk every day, and this is just writing some of my thoughts down in a way that I hope you find interesting.

Now I’ll tell you a secret. I am horribly jealous of the posts that Stanford Smith (@pushingsocial), Suzanne Vara, and Brian Solis write. Their posts are so intuitively helpful, and you can just see the work that went into the crafting of the posts. And yes, their posts really are works of art. If I was trying to write posts like that, there is no way I’d be able to blog as often as I do. However, my mission does not necessitate such posts, and besides, those folks do that kind of post better than I ever could.

Another good idea to factor in when deciding how often you want to blog is the time that you are willing to invest not just in the blogging, but also in the response to comments (and if you say, “Oh, that’s easy, I don’t get any comments,” don’t worry. That will change). All told, it takes me about half an hour to write one of my blog posts. Since I like to blog once a day, I know that every week, I will be investing close to 4 hours in writing my own blogs. Now, the #30Thursday posts I do actually take several hours throughout the week so that needs to get added in for my particular scenario. You need to look at your schedule and see what you can maintain on a weekly basis – again coming back to the consistency thing.

Now there are a few tricks in this regard. For example, I tend to write most of my blog posts for the week over the weekend because I simply don’t have the time to write that much during the week. I edit the posts so that they will publish at 6 AM, which enables me to post them to Facebook and Twitter before I go to work. Some people even automate the publishing to Facebook and Twitter so that they don’t have to touch it at all. You can also gauge things by your work cycle. If every other week your work levels shift, you could write more during the light week so that you can store up for the heavy week.

So to recap, here are some questions I would throw right back at you if you are debating how often you should blog:

1. What kind of experience are you hoping to create for your readers?

2. What kinds of blog posts will you need to write to create that experience?

3. What would be a sustainable level that would enable consistency of output?

4. How much time are you comfortable investing into your blog?

5. What would make the experience most enjoyable for you?

I hope that helps!

Image by Hilde Vanstraelen. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/biewoef

A few days ago, my co-worker, who is the head media buyer now, asked me a really good question. A client of ours is interested in investing in a third-page ad. If you have ever bought ad space before, you know that third-page ads usually come in 3 shapes – horizontal, vertical, and square. All of them are priced the same (usually), so the choice of which version to recommend comes down to a lot of other factors, like what you are going to need to promote in the ad, how the publication places different types of ads, and what kind of ad would be likely to pop the most. We leafed through the publication, discussed it in detail, and made a decision.

All of that work, conversation, and strategizing revolved around a single ad placement for a single client in a single publication. In the grand scheme of things, it might seem like the ramifications of our decision would be pretty small. However, when you place ad space, this is what you have to do if you want to do a good job.

So it is with so much that an agency does. We proofread everything we do. We make sure publications are going to pick up our news releases. We learn about all facets of our clients’ businesses, to the best of our ability, so that our conversations and recommendations can be grounded in their world.

I would wager that companies who work with agencies would say that they appreciate this kind of eye for detail. People like to have someone they can depend on in areas of detail and footwork.

And yet, for some reason, so many people, so many companies, rush right into Social Media as if no care was required. Instead, an air of “I got this” fogs up the room as different people note that “My teenage son/daughter/niece/nephew does this all of the time. How hard can it be?”

A campaign of one

When you buy ad space, you look at the overall circulation, and then you look at the sub-groups within that circulation. Are you reaching the groups of people you need to reach? Have groups of people been qualified?

In Social Media, everything is about 1. You are looking to connect with 1 person at a time. You are looking for 1 really great connection. You are communicating so that everyone feels like he or she is your audience, alone. Does this not also require some planning, some care? Is this not perhaps a different kind of operation that requires a different kind of precision? Would you try to buy media space just because you read a publication? Why then do people and companies attempt to use Social Media marketing with the validation that they have a personal Facebook account that they use at home?

It’s Different and the Same

Suzanne Vara and I often chat about how Social Media marketing and advertising are really not the separate planets that people would make them out to be. Yes, of course Twitter is very different from a print publication or an industry vortal website. Yes, of course Social Media is more dynamic and more “wild West.” Even so, marketing, in the end, is marketing. It still takes a plan. It still takes measurement. It still takes time to make decisions. Maybe it’s whether to use a person’s picture or a company logo as the avatar versus what kind of third-page ad to buy. It’s still a decision. The care must still transfer.

Just something to consider before closing your eyes, plugging your nose, and jumping in.

For many a weary year, I lived and breathed in The Ivory Tower. Academia was a good match for me in a lot of ways. Verbosity is often appreciated, as are ludicrously long words. If you use words that would score well in Scrabble (well, other than cheating words like “ef”) you get magical academic-geek kudos. Very valuable.

As you might have noticed, however, I am not in academia any longer. I am squarely in the business and marketing world. When I first started blogging here, or, well, at Blogspot originally, then…well, I’ve migrated a lot, but anyway, when I first started blogging for my professional account, I had a touch of writer’s laryngitis. I knew that the academic tone wouldn’t work here. You don’t hear a lot, though, about “Business Blog vernacular.” I didn’t really know how to talk.

This problem carried over into my Twitter account (I’ve always been a believer in integrated marketing, and my own lost voice was no exception). As I have mentioned before, when I started using Twitter, I thought it would be fun to post as “The real life mad man.” I thought I could present myself as a female version of Don Draper, a fictional male character who lives in the 1950s/60s. Apart from the fact that I don’t cavort, drink, smoke, or do most other things that Don Draper does in Mad Men, I couldn’t really make a connection with that voice either.

That’s right. I had laryngitis-itis.

I am not Frodo Baggins

I began to think that I would have to go on a wild adventure to find the voice that I would use for my blog and for my Twitter account. Would I have to pull my voice out from the fires of Mount Doom? And by the way, did I need one voice for my blog and one for my Twitter account, or would I need just one voice to cover  both?

Well, my journey did end up being kind of an adventure (although it would make a REALLY boring movie), and here is what I learned.

You are the voice-bearer. It is already within you. If you can talk, if you can write an email, if you can communicate with others versus an expression of your feelings through language, then you can blog and tweet with your own voice.

This is where the 17-step process goes

I’d love to tell you that I went through a certain number of steps to realize that I just needed to be me, but really, as is the case with so much in the Social Media world, I just learned by doing. I can give you a couple of pointers though.

• Shed the idea of a “persona” the way a snake sheds its skin. Leave it by the wayside. People don’t engage with ethereal auras. They engage with other people. You’re a person (or a Google bot). Act like yourself.

• Don’t worry about whether your voice is professional. Now understand, voice is different from language, just like lyrics to a song are quite different from the delivery. Axl Rose could try to sing an anthem from Don Giovanni, but it just would not quite work. Your language needs to be professional (assuming you are blogging for business), but the delivery does not need to remind people of a conference room or a presentation.

• If you are still feeling a little lost, blog via real life talking first. Ask yourself a question, or have someone ask you a question, and listen to how you answer it. Maybe even record it. Your blog, essentially, is the same exact thing. You are talking to 1 person at a time about something you think they might be interested in. In terms of Twitter, it’s even easier to just be yourself in some ways because Twitter is about a more regular exchange of thoughts and ideas.

I know that it can be scary to just throw your own voice onto a website for people to evaluate, but ultimately, at least for me, it was the only way I could get comfortable. My voice is my voice, whether I’m here, on Facebook, on Twitter, or via an email. I know that because “voice” turns out not to be something that you can find. It’s just your voice. You have it and use it all the time.

Try blogging and tweeting the way you talk. Maintain a tone as you would at work or at a professional convention, but be yourself. Be authentically you. And let me know if that helps.

This week’s presentation highlights five big mistakes I see quite often on Twitter. Hope it helps!

Ok, it’s time I let out an ugly truth.

Sometimes, even now, I look at some  Twitter accounts I don’t really like and…I find out that they have more followers than me.

This creates quite the dilemma, because as you might know, I am all about not caring about numbers in Social Media. Still, it’s kind of like that feeling you got in high school when the person you had a mad crush on ended up going out with that vacuous, boring, cliche person who you just couldn’t stand at all. Even if you had the best self-esteem ever (which we all do in high school), it probably made you think, “Gee…what am I missing here?” It throws everything you believe into a sort of purgatory, even if for just a few brief seconds. I see people on Twitter who are doing everything in the world I disagree with. There are people whose profile page can make you dizzy with all of the Retweet icons. There are people whose profile pages are just thank yous to other people for Retweets. And yet very often, these people have more followers than me.

You know what’s really sad? There are SPAM BOTS who have more followers than me! I mean, c’mon people. These aren’t even people! Do you want me to tweet about bacon? Do you want me to tell you that you can win an iPad? I’ll do it!

So what’s going on here?

OK, I’ve regained control of myself. Phew.

Truthfully, I don’t mind that some of these accounts have more followers than me. What really boggles my mind is a two-fold question. Why do hundreds of thousands of people follow those accounts, and why do people I follow follow those accounts?

Obviously a lot of this is created by the “auto-follow” epidemic. As an aside, if you end up following a Bacon Bot, it does make me wonder if you are taking your presence on Twitter seriously. As we say on Twitter, #justsayin

Maybe people follow these strange rogue accounts because you are sure to get your name mentioned. Sometimes autobots mention my name and I am seldom happy about the pragmatic effects of “my name getting out there.” Maybe I am missing something.

Am I missing something?

Image by Berkeley Robinson. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Berkeley