Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Archives for May 2012

Why Marketers Need to Read Marketing in the Round

by

I’ve encountered a rather unexpected problem during my time in the online world. As I’ve made it a habit to review books as honestly as I possibly can, I have also, in parallel, gotten to know and really like people who have written books that I read. This can be nerve-wracking. I really want to like whatever my friends produce, but I don’t write reviews here so you can find out how awesome I think people are (well, not most of the time). I write book reviews to let you know if I think you should read this or that book.

Luckily, in the case of Marketing in the Round, by Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston, I can simultaneously preserve my friendship with both authors while remaining 100% honest about how important I think it is that you read their book.

Not your uncle’s social media book

Even though Geoff and Gini are both really well known in the online/social media world, this book is not a “social media book.” Rather, it’s a marketing book, and even beyond that, it’s a silo busting book.

Marketing in the Round begins with a definition of what a company silo is. “What is meant to produce power and control really creates animosity and suspicion.”

Geoff and Gini argue that after 9/11, as jobs were cut and people became much more worried about their jobs, these silos came back faster than mushrooms after a warm summer rain. People thought that by controlling their departments and the associated information, they could really get a leg up. Instead, this silo infusion actually broke the back of a lot of businesses. The scary thing is that a lot of companies might have a broken back today and yet be totally unaware of it. Marketing in the Round takes a chiropractor’s approach to this broken back problem. It snaps you back into place.

After establishing the four parts of the marketing round’s foundation – key performance indicators, marketing objectives, stakeholders (who they are and how to communicate with them), and the capacity to market (time, human resources), the book begins to give you an increasingly detailed, increasingly in-depth analysis of how the marketing round can work and what it can accomplish. As you read you travel through the following:

1. The different kinds of media (earned, paid, owned) and the steps needed to advance from crawling to walking to flying

2. Your relationship with your stakeholders – how to listen, SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), and the importance of testing the waters

3. Marketing strategy – Direct, Groundswell, Top Down, Flank – This is perhaps the greatest strength of the book, as each type of marketing strategy is analyzed in tremendous detail, complete with pros and cons. For example, direct marketing is broken out into advertising, event marketing, email marketing, and social media with hefty analysis of each segment. This is continued for the other three approaches.

4. Measurement, Refinement, Improvement – Gini and Geoff provide a lot of detail about what to measure, how to measure, how to set objectives, and how to be willing to change your approach. They delve into more detail, again, than I have seen in other marketing books, down to how to create a dashboard using Excel.

Ultimately, Marketing in the Round is a story about integration. It’s about how you need to integrate your departments so that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It’s about integrating your objectives with the corporate objectives. It’s about integrating data so that everyone can work from the same information. And it’s about working with your external partners as seamlessly as possible.

To put it another way, if you are in a business that needs to market a product or service, this book is a must read.

Steps to success

Marketing in the Round touches on so many things you may find that you want to dig even deeper into one aspect before jumping into the next chapter. This is the kind of book that encourages you to work, not just read, so I would recommend the following if you really want to jumpstart your business.

After you read the first part, give a gander to The Now Revolution by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund. They concentrate on the types of culture shifts that Geoff and Gini touch on – that whole, “Do you need to stimulate a crisis to create change” conundrum.

As you read about the different marketing approaches, follow Geoff and Gini’s suggestion and check out Content Rules by CC Chapman and Ann Handley, particularly if you are new to creating content. That would be a great partner for a lot of the creative and copywriting information Marketing in the Round provides.

As you read the final part treating measurement and management, check out Olivier Blanchard’s Social Media ROI, which touches on a lot of the integration issues Geoff and Gini talks about but also, per the name, delves more into measurement and what to do with the information you gather.

As you read all of these books together, you’ll end up where Geoff and Gini take you at the end of their book – an understanding of how your entire marketing plan can be approved by your marketing round, integrated from types of marketing approach to specific details, and honed to meet your customers and prospects right where they are. And you’ll even be able to report to the c-suite on how all of this is going.

Buy the book. Right here. And this is not an affiliate link. Then let me know what you think about it.

Image via SpinSucks.com

Book Review: The Hidden Wealth of Customers

by

Harvard Business Press was good enough to send me an advanced copy of Bill Lee’s The Hidden Wealth of Customers. If you have read John Jantsch’s The Referral Engine and/or Lou Imbriano’s Winning the Customer, you’ll perhaps understand what I mean when I say that if those 2 books had a baby, this would be it.

At the core of the book is the idea that companies do not really understand who their greatest brand advocates are, nor do they understand how to harness the power of those people. Unlike The Referral Engine or Winning the Customer, Lee gets a bit more technical. For example, this book delves a lot into details about things like NPS (Net Promoter Scales). Also offered are formulas that will help you calculate how profitable your customers are. For example, if someone buys from you and says, “I bought from you because Jane said you guys were great,” you can attribute a portion of that sale to your customer Jane.

The real core of the book, however, is that the old relationship between company and customer needs to undergo a facelift. The days of you just selling stuff and your customers just buying stuff are now gone. Lee makes a case for helping to nourish your “rock star” customer.

There are a lot of ways you can nourish a customer from the point of awareness down to being a cherished brand advocate. But what becomes clear in Lee’s book, just as is underlined in the books by Jantsch and Imbriano, is that you have to have an organized approach towards gathering the information you need to make this happen. For example, you need to know who among your customers wants to refer you to other people. In order to give your customers a memorable experience, you have to know not only what they want but also what they want to accomplish.

Lee uses an example of a company helping a “rock star” expand her influence in her industry. The company invites her to write white papers and speak at their events. As she builds momentum she continues to refer to the company as one that partnered with her to help her out. Everybody wins, and once this type of relationship starts, it can continue to increase its benefits for all parties involved.

The only thing that really bothered me about the book was the use of the phrase “Return on Relationship.” I think this kind of buzz phrase, at a time when ROI is not really understood, can confuse/mislead a lot of people and perhaps distract them from the key point Lee is trying to make.

If you are looking for ways to deepen your relationship with your customers, this book will definitely give you some great ideas and some strong recommendations on how to track and measure your efforts.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvorscak/4259307417 via Creative Commons

Be Someone For Kids Who Have No One

by

When I was still a pretty little kid, I saw a show about foster kids. It must have been 20/20 or something like that. I still remember one pivotal part of the story. Kids who were around 12 years old were standing in line because people interested in adopting children were coming to visit the foster home. The kids talked about how they always wanted to give the best possible impression. They smiled as much as possible, they were as nice as possible. But because they weren’t cute little babies anymore, they knew that their chances weren’t real good. Indeed, none of the children featured on the show were adopted that day.

This is a story that is being lived out by kids all over the nation. The thing is, these kids are on a clock. If they are not adopted by the age of 21, they actually “age out” of the foster care system. With no more existing connections in the foster care system, no family, and no solid foundation to turn to, these young adults often suffer very difficult lives.

The stories of these lost children are finally being highlighted by a group called SalaamGarage NYC. This group is gathering stories and photographs for a photography exhibit, a website, and a book. The stories reveal, as the group’s kickstarter page indicates, “sobering odds.” “Nationally, 1 in 5 will become Homeless.  1 in 4 will be incarcerated within two years of aging-out.  About 1 in 2 young women will be pregnant within one year and only about half will graduate high school.”

You can help turn the tide

Thanks to the wonders of social media and modern technology, we have a chance to spread the word about the SalaamGarage project, which means we in turn have a chance to help shine the light on these stories that are too often shoved into dark corners and ignored. The project is looking for funding of just under $13,500, and we have 33 days to make that happen.

Visit the Kickstarter page. Watch the video, which does a much better job than this of explaining the plight of these young people. See if you can donate a little, or if you can’t, just help me spread the word. It’s the least we can do for these kids, don’t you think? And after all, as the project so eloquently states – Everybody needs someone.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvs/15495574/ via Creative Commons

What are you waiting for?

by

Have you ever heard of Hildegard von Bingen? You might have heard her called Sibyl of the Rhine. Same person. Well, here’s the thing about Hildegard/Sibyl. She was one of those people who was good at everything. Among her accomplishments, she ended up writing at least 69 musical compositions (plus verse), 3 books of visions, and many letters to all sorts of correspondents. Hildegard created her own modified Latin alphabet, gained renown as a healer (she wrote a book about how to use different medicinal herbs to treat ailments), and was a respected woman at a time when this was almost an oxymoron. Indeed, although she has not been canonized, she is such a beloved figure that she is sometimes called Saint Hildegard.

You might think, given all of these accomplishments, that Hildegard would have been a pretty confident person. Maybe even a little full of herself. I mean, if people gravitated to you to hear your advice about things ranging from medicine to mysticism, you might feel kind of happy with yourself, right? Indeed, we experience this in the online world a lot. People come to our blogs, people tweet us with questions, and it’s hard to remember that we are still just our regular ole normal selves.

In the case of Hildegard, though, the world almost did not get to benefit from her amazing contributions:

But I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words, not with stubbornness but in the exercise of humility, until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses, and by the witness of a certain noble maiden of good conduct [the nun Richardis von Stade] and of that man whom I had secretly sought and found, as mentioned above, I set my hand to the writing. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen).

That’s right. As talented as she was, as respected as she was, as amazing as she was, Hildegard almost did not sit down to write anything. Even though she had so much to offer, and even though it ended up that writing brought her great joy and peace of mind, she almost did not begin to write. The world almost missed out.

What are you holding back?

One of the great problems in life is that we don’t always know what we can offer until we sit down and start to *do* things. A writer does not know how good they are until they start to write. A singer cannot know how good her voice is until she opens her mouth and lets the sound come out. A musician cannot know how good he is until he sits down at the piano and begins to play.

Hildegard would never have known her capacity to affect people if she had not made the decision to write, despite any feelings of worthlessness she experienced.

What are you withholding from the world? What are you holding back? Are you thinking about blogging but you’re not sure you’re a good enough writer? Are you thinking you’d like to start a business but you’re not sure you’re cut out for it?

There’s only one way to find out. Let me fulfill the role of Richardis von Stade (but you can call me Margie). Go ahead and try it. Write something down. Let a song come out of your voicebox. Let music play from your fingers. You might find that you’re a lot better than what your brain is telling you. You might find you have one heck of a lot to offer. Who knows, maybe you are the next Hildegard von Bingen of the blogging world or the business world. Maybe it turns out you actually are fantastically good at a lot of things. Maybe it turns out you have the power to affect, in a positive way, a whole ton people. Maybe your work, whatever that may be, will be remembered centuries or even millennia from now.

But you’ll never know if you don’t sit down to try it.

What are you waiting for?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/klaudi/5604377366/ via Creative Commons

Thank Goodness Hammurabi Is Not On Twitter

by

Our final visit to the super ancient world for the History Lessons for the Social Media Practitioner Series takes us to Babylon in the year 1772 BC (or so). Hammurabi ruled the Babylonians for 42 years, and during that time, something inspired him to have some really important laws scratched on to 8′ tall rocks. We’re glad that he had this done, because Hammurabi’s Code remains one of the oldest known sets of written laws in the world. It’s a shame he doesn’t get to enjoy that part, huh?

The thing about Hammurabi’s Code that struck me the very first time I heard about it was that it was kind of…rough. Hammurabi’s Code introduced the world, for example, to the concept of “an eye for an eye.” In other words, if you gouge my eye out of my face, I can do the same thing to you, assuming I can see well enough.

Some of the specific laws contained in the code would be pretty helpful in controlling the online world so many many millennia later, but the punishments make me wonder if our behavior is really more reprehensible than I had previously thought. Here, let me show you what I’m talking about.

22. If a man has committed highway robbery and has been caught, that man shall be put to death.

Highway robbery. Well, you might think that this phrase would have nothing to do with the online world, but actually my friend Ameena Falchetto has experienced highway robbery first-hand. Would Hammurabi put the hammer down on her copy-catter? It seems so.

Now here’s another one. There is always a lot of talk about “a-holes” and “d-bags” in the online world, and one might rightly call this namecalling a series of “low blows.” Interestingly, Hammurabi had a lot to say about hits below the belt.

  • 202. If a man has smitten the privates of a man, higher in rank than he, he shall be sourged with sixty blows of an ox-hide scourge, in the assembly.
  • 203. If a man has smitten the privates of a patrician of his own rank, he shall pay one mina of silver.
  • 204. If a plebeian has smitten the privates of a plebeian, he shall pay ten shekels of silver.
  • 205. If a slave of anyone has smitten the privates of a free-born man, his ear shall be cut off.

Now, who wants to monitor the online world and make sure that for every low blow, there is appropriate retribution? This might reduce the online drama a bit, right? I think it’s a good idea, anyway.

218. If a physician make a large incision with the operating knife, and kill him, or open a tumor with the operating knife, and cut out the eye, his hands shall be cut off.

This is a lot of pressure to put on a physician. I wonder if Hammurabi would be equally tough on people offering business or marketing advice online. If your advice doesn’t work, I’m afraid your hand needs to be cut off. Ouch. Then again, it would be interesting to see if the advice being offered would suddenly change radically, right?

Of course, many of the laws contained in the Code of Hammurabi have to do with slaves and animals…oxen and….asses. Well, I suppose if we were mean-spirited we could draw some parallels there, but I don’t want to make a false claim, which would result in me having to ” leap into the river” and hopefully not sink, which would prove my innocence.

See? Hammurabi is making me behave better online already.

So what do you think? What can we learn about ourselves here in the 21st plugged-in century by reflecting on one of the first sets of laws ever to be written? I think it’s sort of refreshing to see that humans really haven’t changed that much. We’re still building houses that fall down. We’re still stealing each others’ spouses, pushing over oxen, and doing all kinds of other dumb stuff. Is that comforting, or an argument against evolution?

You tell me!

Sources for Hammurabi’s Code: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp and http://www.commonlaw.com/Hammurabi.html

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/un_cola/64424869/ via Creative Commons

In Defense of Agencies – Again

by

I’ve read two posts over the last few days that really seemed to paint agencies in a negative light. Being an agency woman for an agency that bears my family name, I can’t help but take these attacks on agencies to heart. I know – it’s not personal, it’s business. But for me, business is all about the personal. So, let’s move on!

The Pitch is Not Representative of All Agencies

The first post, called “Traditional Advertising is Truly Dead,”  was written by Robert Bruce for CopyBlogger. Robert doesn’t tend to mince words like a lot of folks in the CopyBlogger family, so it’s not a surprise that he doesn’t handle his perspective with kid gloves here. Let’s take a look at this post carefully.

It begins with a warning:

“If you’re addicted to spending ungodly amounts of money in an effort to interrupt enough people into becoming “aware” of your product, service, or idea … skip this. You ain’t gonna like it.”

Well, I could write a whole series of posts about how this is not an accurate assessment of “traditional” advertising efforts, but suffice to say I am not sure this is framing the conversation in a 100% accurate or fair way.

Next, Bruce quotes a person from one of the agencies in the first episode of The Pitch, a new show on AMC that pits one agency against another. The quote: “We pride ourselves on creativity, not playing it safe, doing things that no one has ever seen before.” Bruce is flummoxed by this quote. He says, “Creating things that “nobody has seen before” — aside from the hyperbole of that statement — could work well as ride in an amusement park, or a fireworks display, but it’s the kiss of death in the art of selling.”

I’m not so sure about that. I don’t know the whole context of the quotation (that’s right, I’m an agency woman and don’t want to watch this show) but as an agency woman, I can say that if you are in a niche business, it’s pretty hard to talk about things in ways that will stand out. I’m sure Subway has a similar problem (they were the ones being pitched in the first episode). How much can you say about a sandwich, anyway? I am not sure that the “entertainment value” is what is at stake here. Your agency should provide you with something that strengthens your brand and makes you memorable.

The next big statement in this post is this: “If you’re throwing brand advertising at the masses and hoping something will stick, you’re playing a game that’s already over. Consumers have taken their ball and gone home.”

Again, this is a pretty broad statement to make, and I am just not convinced it’s true. Our work indicates that a lot of professionals still prefer to receive e-newsletters that are nothing more than product announcements in their inbox. They WANT to know what’s new in their industry. There are people who subscribe, still, to every professional publication that is relevant to the. They WANT to read the newest thoughts. They WANT to see what’s out there. Yes, they even participate in ad impact studies. Which means they look at the ads. They recall them. A lot of them still act on those ads. Consumers have gone home – ie away from traditional advertising? Certainly some have. There’s a reason newspapers are going broke. But not everyone. And if you’re a company that has had success using traditional marketing, you shouldn’t stop based on the idea that the “game is over.”

One final statement that buzzed me wrong in this post:

The equation used to be: money x media = business.

The new equation is: time x media = business.

I think this is a false comparison, and it’s at the heart of why so many companies are struggling with social media today. Time IS money. If you are spending time blogging, you are paying your salary (or someone else’s) to do that. Time is money. Traditionally rooted or not, you have to cope with this basic business truth.

People won’t read a boring blog, no matter what

The second post came my way from Chris Brogan. His post is called Nobody Reads Agency Blogs – Or Why You Need Skin in the Game. Now, Chris wrote this post based on an article he found via Jason Falls – it’s over here. And that article includes the following quote:

“Nobody reads agency blogs, and there are so many out there it’s impossible for people to keep up anyway,” said Sam Weston, director of communications at digital agency Huge. “We put ours on hiatus while we figure out what we want to do with it. We do use Facebook and Twitter. We’ve figured out what works for us there.”

It’s a real shame this quote came from an agency person. It doesn’t make sense to make a statement like this.

Nobody reads agency blogs, or nobody read YOUR agency blog?

Now Chris sort of veers away from the agency thing and notes that nobody wants to read a boring blog no matter who it’s by, and that’s what’s missing from the quote by Sam Weston. You could be an astronaut, but if your blog site is more boring than a pale piece of milktoast, you’re not going to have a lot of readers. Period.

This is not an agency thing. This is a blog thing. This is a Web 2.0 thing. Was the Huge blog too self-promotional? Were they not getting good buzz because they’re only turning to Facebook and Twitter now? Who knows. But this is not good ground to say that agency blogs are boring and dead.

By the way, I have to point out that if you’re here reading this, you’re reading a blog post by an agency woman. As the kids say…#justsayin.

Yep, I’m harumphed

I really do not understand why agencies get bashed so often. Posts like these seem to be increasing, not decreasing. Factually, agencies are diverse with different missions, different ways of working, different…all sorts of stuff. Saying that “agencies are…” is like saying “People are…”  To me, painting with such a broad stroke, especially if you are not in the agency world, is just a gimme blog post or article. People will pass it along and unfortunately, many will agree. Traditional = yucky. Agency = bad.

Some agencies are yucky. Some agencies are bad. Some agency blogs are probably crap.

I’d venture to say the same thing is true those in the social media world. Or in the laundromat world. Or in the cooking world.

Give agencies a break, eh? Just this once?

What do you think?

First Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sincerelyhiten/6348866375/ via Creative Commons

Second Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scragz/91147636/ via Creative Commons