Margie Clayman

When I was in high school, I always had an assignment book. Well at the beginning of the year I’d have an assignment book, anyway. The assignment book was like a planner except that, appropriately enough, it catered towards my needs as a student. You could look at a day, a week, a month. Heck, you could look at a year at a glance if you really wanted to.

Of course, there was always a problem with my assignment book. I never took the time to sit down and write what I had to do. “By the time you write down everything you have coming up, you could already be halfway done doing the first thing,” I reasoned. By about the middle of November, my poor, forlorn assignment book would be buried at the bottom of my bookbag, its cover curled and torn beyond recognition.

I think back on those days a lot. I spent a lot of time “freaking out” in high school because I always felt I was being overbooked (ha ha, what high schoolers don’t know). I was on the schools’ speech team, I had volunteer hours to do for The National Honors Society, I had homework in every class every day, and I was fastidious about doing all of my reading because I was consciously trying to graduate in the top ten. I remained pretty organized and I got the job done, but I sometimes wonder how much better my quality of life might have been if I had taken the time to fill in that beautiful assignment book with the faux leather cover.

“I don’t have time to plan”

A lot of people and companies today are just the way I was when I was in high school. I don’t mean hormonally (although…), but a lot of us just feel like we have too much going on. We freak out. If someone tells us to sit down, calm down, and write it all down, we tend to flip out, for lack of a better phrase. But factually, at least when it comes to marketing, planning is the single best way not only to make your quality of life better, but also to improve each and every one of your marketing initiatives.

“I should really know the answer to that question”

One thing that we have found as we have helped our clients and prospects plan over the years is that sometimes questions come out of the process that no one had planned on. We can’t really predict what these questions will be or where they might come from. Sometimes questions about a company’s corporate identity pop up as we look at their website. Sometimes questions about a company’s long-term sales goals come up when we look at their existing sales methodologies. This can be an arduous journey, especially when loud tick tock of the clock can be heard all of the time. But there’s one thing I can tell you. Those questions, if they exist, will pop up at some point, whether you plan or not. We tend to think it’s better to have a chance to answer the questions when there isn’t a whole lot on the line immediately. The best answers come when there’s time for thought and no stress from a problem or time shortages.

“Plan for the worst, hope for the best” is not a marketing adage

There was a question on LinkedIn today about how to drive more readers to a company e-newsletter. I see questions like this a lot on the various sites where I chat with other people. “How can I promote the fact that we just launched a new product?” “How can I promote my Facebook page?”

These questions are symptoms. They are not symptoms of a disease. Perhaps they are not even symptoms of a problem within your company. What they are, though, are symptoms of a lack of planning.

Very few things in the marketing world happen accidentally. Sometimes you can meet the right person at the right time. Sometimes you can write something that just happens to hit someone influential in the right way. But generally, marketing success is the result of conniving, sweat on the brow planning. Why is that? A marketing plan means that you don’t just plan to have an e-newsletter. You plan to have promotions within your e-newsletter to attract interest. You plan to invite one reader a month to write a guest story. You plan to share your e-newsletter via your Facebook page and your blog. In other words, for every marketing action that you can think of, your plan should ride the ripples out to the edge of the pond to see all of the ways that single action could be integrated with other actions, with a follow-up plan, and with anything else you might need.

It’s true that there are things you can’t plan for. Maybe the idea for a new product or service comes up that wasn’t involved in your initial plan. That’s okay. A marketing plan doesn’t have to be locked down to the letter. You don’t have to adhere strictly to what you write up. But the structure for planning should be something you always plan on. Avoid the rush tactic of promoting your new product willy nilly. Sit down and make a plan just on how to promote that product. You will find that doing so pays dividends.

What fills the planning hole?

Of course, it’s possible to survive just fine without a plan. The “seat of the pants” crowd has a loyal membership, and it’s because it’s fast and most of the time, maybe, it works. But here’s the problem with the “seat of the pants” approach and marketing. Without a plan, and with all of the pressures that we exist under every day, it’s really, really easy to fall into traps that result in huge mistakes or messes. Imagine a new toy being rushed to the market in time for the holidays without appropriate testing. The results could be tragic! Well, the same holds true for rushing your marketing initiatives to the industry. Maybe you pick a product name that has already been trademarked. Maybe you send out an ad or a news release that has a typo in it (for example, maybe the name of the product or the company name is spelled wrong). A marketing plan can serve as a safety net. You can see when things are coming. You can glance ahead, just like I could have done in my assignment notebook. I could have avoided disastrous meltdowns (or at least the ones caused by the amount of work and persecution I felt I was experiencing). You can avoid dangerous situations like trying to create a slogan in 12 hours.

That sounds like a lot of work

Planning is a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of massaging, and just like the potter with the potting wheel, sometimes you have to just mush the whole thing and start over again. Then again, sometimes you can end up with a campaign that is cohesive, sensible, fully thought through, and effective. Is that a fair trade? We tend to think it’s a pretty good investment of some elbow grease at Clayman Advertising. I’d love to hear what you think.

1st Image by Hilde Vanstraelen. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/biewoef

2nd Image by sanja gjenero. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/lusi

One of the weirdest things happened about a month ago. I was on Twitter chatting with my good buddy Stanford Smith (@pushingsocial). Somehow, we got to talking about his hometown. As it happens, we grew up probably no more than 10 minutes apart. Even though Mr. Smith no longer resides in our forlorn Buckeye state, I still count him as ahometown hero. In addition to being native Akronites, we share a lot of the same views when it comes to Social Media (except, as you will see, when it comes to blogrolls). So, I asked the always gracious Mr. Pushing (as I like to call him) if I could interview him. Here are the results.

The Mad Man: At PushingSocial.com, you write a lot about authenticity. There seems to be a lot of buzz these days that authenticity in Social Media is at a premium. Do you agree? How do you define when someone is being inauthentic?

SS: I believe someone is being inauthentic when they are not speaking from a place of passion and experience. For me, blogging is about introducing yourself to the world. I think that many of the problems we grapple with spring from poor communication. Social Media excites me because we can finally create and respond TO EACH OTHER in ways that make a real difference.

The Mad Man: You’ve already made a lot of waves with people listing you as an important resource and a blog to keep an eye on. What are you hoping to accomplish in 2011?

SS: I’m really focusing on creating deeper experiences for my readers. I feel in my gut that reading a blog should be an ACTIVE experience where you get inspired, get equipped, and get whipped into action. So I’m working on an ebook that will be ready in the next month or so and actively helping people to get their passions and blogs noticed. I’m also taking a serious look at how we can revolutionize cause related social marketing. Cool stuff.

The Mad Man: As a fellow Akronite, it must pain you, like it pains me, that the major hubs for Social Media activity are Boston, Chicago, and then the whole West Coast. Do you think we can make the Midwest a respectable player?

SS: Absolutely, I’m proud of the growing SM community we have in Southeast Michigan. I would love for you to organize and get Akron/Cleveland pushing the boundaries…Although Social isn’t confined by geography you definitely can see its impact locally when people take what they learn and apply it to their businesses and organizations.

The Mad Man: What do you think is the biggest mistake people are making in their Social Media marketing right now?

SS: Following so-called Social Media Rules. I can’t stand hearing people parrot the latest “formula.” As you know, I feel strongly that your rules are set by your audience. I’m 110% dedicated to my readers. If they only need to hear from me once a month then I’ll put my heart and soul into it. If my audience hates Facebook – I won’t be there. Simple.

The Mad Man: Just for the record, tell me what think about blogrolls again… 🙂

SS: I swear…blogrolls represent everything that is wrong with the world.

You can learn a lot from Mr. Smith. I’d direct you to link to him from my blogroll, but out of respect, I don’t have his blog listed there 🙂

Thanks, Stanford, for the time!

A lot of people agree now that Social Media has become an integral part of marketing. A lot of people know what Facebook is. Fewer people might know about Foursquare or Gowalla right now, but it’s all catching on. In perusing what’s out there in Social Media, it’s easy to find a lot of information about Social Media. Whether you believe there are “experts” or not, there is a lot of content that tells you how to succeed using Social Media. There is even some content that tells you how to fail.

If you are new to this world of Social Media, or if you are new to marketing in general, what you are probably not seeing a lot of is how all of this information can be adapted by you and/or your company. There isn’t a post or an e-book that speaks directly to you. I can’t promise that this blog will be all that different. After all, without talking to you I can’t really give you customized information. But what I can tell you is how to go about answering some of the questions that can help you get started.

Go where the customers are.

One thing you can learn a lot about is the importance of relationship building in Social Media. You see a lot of sites that help you learn how to nuance your blog posts away from language that sells. You read a lot about how important it is to be yourself. But there’s one really important thing you need to do first. You need to go where your existing and potential customers are. There’s nothing wrong with networking with people who are interested in fishing when  you manufacture CNC machines, but it’s probably not going to generate the levels of success that you’ve been hearing about.

How do you know where your customers are? Well, you need to do some research, something that Clayman Advertising can help you with. And what do we help you research? There are two things you need to find out right away. First, are your customers actually out there using Social Media? Second, if they are out there, how are they conversing about your industry? A close third, of course, is, “are they talking about you.”

One thing that concerns me about the current marketing environment is that the whole feel is like a college party, and Social Media is the drink of choice that everyone thinks you should have. You should, in fact, totally go bonkers for that drink, and if you don’t, you’re a bit of a party pooper.

The thing is, sometimes we conduct research and we find out that Facebook is not fertile ground in which a garden of great results can be planted. That’s not to say that Facebook is bad or that it will never come in handy. It just means that existing and potential customers aren’t there now. Sometimes there is only relevant activity on YouTube. Sometimes there just isn’t much buzz at all (I talk about this conundrum in more detail in an earlier blogpost called “The Social Media Case Study You’ll Never Hear About“).

If you find that Social Media is not heavily populated by customers or potential customers, the next step is to find out if your competitors are out there.

Go where your competitors are.

There are two things you want to look at when researching the Social Media activity of your competitors. Again, this is something we can help you with, but generally, you want to a) see if your competitors are using Social Media and b) You want to see how they’re doing. What do I mean by that? It means you want to look at that competitor’s Facebook page. You can look at how many fans (I guess we should call them “likers” now) the page has. But more importantly, you want to look at the activity. It’s relatively easy to get fans or followers, especially if you’re a big company. If everyone at the company likes the page, you could end up with a commendable 500 fans right off the bat. What you really want to look for is the nature of the posts that are being made and what kind of reactions those posts are receiving. If the same person is posting a news release every Wednesday to a room of crickets, you can assume that the page is not successful. If people other than the page’s host are posting to the page, if there is a lot of conversation, if there is a lot of liking going on, then that is something you want to make note of.

Same rules apply for YouTube and Twitter. A company could end up with 1,00 followers almost by accident. Are they conversing with those followers? Are they using the tool appropriately? Are they getting responses?

If you find that your competitors are having a fair amount of success even despite your research showing that the conversation rate is low, it adds more weight to your consideration. If your competitors are mostly talking to themselves, it’s safe to assume that the time is not right for you to join the lonely crowd.

Go where you can shine.

The final consideration in the first round of identifying where in the Social Media world you should go is where you and your company can shine. Where can you provide the most value to your customers so that you can start to build that online following? What kind of content do you have already that could easily be used for other purposes? If you have a lot of white papers, for example, maybe a blog is a good place for you to start. If you have a vast video library that’s getting dusty on your website, enter into YouTube and start letting people find your company that way. Play to your strengths. That is what ultimately will win you business and help you maintain business.

Go carefully.

These are all important things to consider, and they are just the beginning. Once you figure out where you want to be, you need to figure out what you’re going to do there. Avoid the temptation of falling victim to the excitement or the peer pressure. Your customers will be there tomorrow if they’re there today. Determine how you can integrate your new Social Media efforts with other existing marketing initiatives. Determine your corporate policy. All of those are part of the nitty gritty on how you and/or your company can actually set forth on the path to Social Media success.

Did this help? Do you have any questions? I’d be happy to answer them! Just leave a comment below.

1st image by ostillac callisto. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ostillac
2nd Image by Gabriella Fabbri. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/duchesssa

Thanks to my status as a life-long Cleveland Indians fan, I’ve seen my share of announcers trying to explain why pitchers are so incredibly bad. I’ve seen pitchers literally dribble the ball towards homeplate. I’ve seen pitchers walk 6-7 people in a row. Inevitably, when the game gets too painful, the announcers start talking about the pitcher’s delivery. Most often, they talk about the fact that his follow-through seems poor. His arm is in the wrong position. His foot is 5 inches off the mound instead of 3.

For a pitcher, “feedback” is what happens to his pitch once it’s thrown. If it’s a good pitch, the pitcher attains his goal. In the case of most Cleveland Indians pitchers, the feedback is bad.

In business, we have often been framing things like a pitcher would. We make a pitch, we look for feedback. Hopefully in your case you are hoping for a homerun rather than a strike-out, but otherwise, it’s the same general concept. If your feedback is bad, or begins to decrease in quality, you look everywhere, trying to find the core of the problem. Well, much like a pitcher, your problem may be your follow-through.

A symptom of the old days

One sign that companies, for the most part, still haven’t adjusted to the Age of the Customer is that we are still asking for feedback. What do you think of this website? What do you think of our product? Did you like our pitch? Did you like me? Did you like my speech?

“What’s wrong with that?” You may ask.

Well, in asking for feedback, we are putting the burden on our customers, or on our audience. We’re saying, “We appreciate you buying our product, now tell us if you like it.” Moreover, asking for feedback is still making the whole issue about us. It’s kind of like the insecure person who always asks you how they look, even after you compliment them 2-3 times. After awhile, you start to wonder if you’re missing something.

The art of follow-through

Instead of making it about you the company, the interest should really be in your customer. You should follow up with your customers. I’m not talking about automated surveys, either, although those are at least going in the right direction. We should emphasize to our customers and potential customers that we are sincerely interested in how they perceived their experience with us. Did your product or service meet their needs? Did it solve their problem? Are they satisfied? Do they need anything else? Imagine a real live person contacting you the way you said you wanted to be contacted, with the communique just saying, “Hey, saw that you bought xyz product or xyz service. Wanted to make sure everything is okay and that you don’t need anything else.”

What a wonder.

The thing is, it’s not just customers that we should follow through with. In these days where integrated marketing is growing in importance, you should also follow through with other departments in your company, or if you work on your own, follow through yourself to make sure different initiatives are supporting each other. Instead of just asking for feedback on a marketing initiative, marketing should follow through with sales to make sure the ad or email campaign is indeed effective. Instead of asking for feedback on a PR campaign, PR people should talk to customer support to make sure that customers feel better about the company and the product.

Poor follow-through can yield poor feedback

Just like a pitcher who has a kink in his follow-through, your company will start to notice that your feedback will decline in positivity if you have poor follow-through. If you don’t follow through with your customers, you might not get any feedback at all. If you don’t follow through with other departments to make sure that everything is working as it should, things might not work, and no one would be the wiser.

On the other side of the coin, of course, is that really good follow-through can set the stage for extremely positive feedback which you won’t have to ask for. Making sure that a customer is “good to go” can make a huge impression. They will rave about you and spread the word. Just like a surprise present for no apparent reason, positive feedback that is received without being requested is all the sweeter.

Are you following through or are you still asking for feedback? There are extremely positive and fun ways to follow through with customers, regardless of what you have offered them (product, service, webinar, trade show experience). Maybe Clayman Advertising could step in as pitching coach and help you with that follow-through mechanism.

Every morning, I wake up and do the same things in the same order, pretty much without fail. I do this for a few reasons. First, my IQ is basically not present when I first wake up, so without a set plan I would very likely end up trying to walk to work with shoes that wouldn’t match and with my PJ shirt on. You might think I’m exaggerating, but yesterday I woke up at 6:30 and couldn’t figure out if I was late for work. We open at 8. I also do the same things in the same order because it’s comfortable. I know that I will get everything done that I need to get done. I know how long each step takes me. I can do it with my eyes closed. Sometimes I *do* do it all with my eyes closed. Makes the drive to work exciting sometimes.

Comfort, I fear, has become both dangerous and an endangered species. If you become comfortable, it’s easy to get in ruts. It’s easy to think that the comfortable way is the only way. Our fear of changing things, of becoming uncomfortable, gets a hold of us. On the other hand, who among us feels comfortable these days? How many people do just 1 job and focus on that alone? How many people feel that their profession is going to survive this mad ride that the economy has us on (still)? Comfort is something we crave and avoid these days. No wonder we are all going crazy.

That’s Marketing, Too

I’ve been writing a lot in this blog about the newly defined integrated marketing. The first step in adjusting your company’s philosophy to one of accepting this revolution is stepping out of the comfort zone. I understand that this is complex. Talking about change in a blog is easy. Doing change is hard. Leaving your comfort zone means you are doing and trying new things. It means you are leaving yourself open to failure as well as success. It means things you used to be able to count on are now gambles.

When we talk about employees being asked to work in new ways, we are talking about real people. We are talking about your head of marketing who just adopted a child from China. We are talking about Suzie, who is very worried about her father. If you’re in a company where you are being told that all of this new integrated marketing “stuff” is coming your way, everyone is going to have to leave their comfort zone to some extent, because all of this is new, or is being seen in new ways.

A little story

Let me tell you a little story about how leaving your comfort zone, while scary as all get out, can be worth the transition.

A few years ago, a lady went to Google to find out some more information about a television show she liked. In doing so, she found a bunch of results on a website, so she naturally went to check it out. What it turned out to be was a message board run and populated by fans of the show. The lady started posting to the board. She started talking to people.

After a few months, the lady became pretty involved in the board because she found a few kindred souls that she ended up talking to every day. But the lady always used a pseudonym, and she was so paranoid about putting her information out there on the web that she created a “real life” pseudonym, an email account tied to that pseudonym, and she made private every post that she had made to her blog. Even as it became clear that some of these people were becoming real-life friends, even after talking to some of them on the phone, giving information out over the internet did not become any easier. It was uncomfortable.

If you guessed that this story is about me, you are correct. There is still a lot about this online world that I find uncomfortable. Businesses go through similar palpitations. “What if I reveal too much?” “What if my competitors use information against me?” “What if a customer bad-mouths our company or our product?” Maybe you are having these doubts right now.

What have I received as the result of leaving my comfort zone online? Invaluable friendships. Growing networks. Vast amounts of knowledge that only increase every day. Potential for growth. Potential for new connections. Has it been worth it to leave my comfort zone? So far — yes.

Marketing as it exists today is full of ways to leave your comfort zone. Take a look at new publications. Take a look at how to tie your advertising campaign to a direct mail campaign. Examine how sales and marketing could work better together at your company. It’s true that there are risks. But what could you gain? A stronger brand. Happier customers. A better ROI. A winning story. A happy company. An evolved and happier you. Is that worth the risk?

Maybe it’s time to get a little comfortable with being uncomfortable. What do you think?

Image by Andrea De Stefani. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/deste

What did I think of The Referral Engine? That’s what you really want to know.

Right?