Marketing Talk

As he is wont to do, Michael Schechter said something very interesting, this time on a recent post of mine (this one over here). Here is what Michael said:

It’s become more about the people than the work or even the subject at hand. If we just shifted our focus from our feelings to the subject at hand, we’d be stronger for it… as would the space as a whole. Because the real problem is that the fear of hurting someones feelings (and to an equal extent, people’s inability to make a point without doing so) just takes us away from what’s really important, examining and learning about whatever subject is at hand.

This has been rolling around in my head for awhile now when it comes especially to how we can help businesses online. It seems like there is always a thread in the online world that goes one of two ways.

1. All agencies are evil. They over-promise, under-deliver, and rip companies off.

2. Social Media experts are evil. They over-promise, under-deliver, and rip companies off.

While it may be companies that begin these conversations, aforementioned agency types and social media types tend to add fuel to the fire. An agency person (or someone who was in marketing long before social media was born) may say something like, “Oh yeah, those social media types have NO idea what they are talking about.” Meanwhile the social media folks may write about how agencies have no idea how to work in the new world of marketing.

The problem is that both sides are making some interesting points, but what is being forgotten, per Michael’s comment, is that all of these points should be noted and explored in an effort to help the companies we are working with and for. Attacking other people on Twitter or in the blogosphere really doesn’t do anything except propagate the worst rumors about everybody.

With all of that said, let’s talk about some of the accusations that are floating around out there. How can we analyze these issues in a way that will actually help companies out? Let’s see what we can do.

Agencies say…Social Media folks don’t understand a lot of basic marketing concepts.

If you are steeped in the world of social media, you’ve probably heard that your brand is basically your logo. Maybe you heard that ROI doesn’t exist in the online world or that it stands for “Return on Influence.” Maybe you’ve heard that B2B has been replaced by Person-to-Person business. Maybe you’ve heard that cold-calling is stupid and print is dead.

What companies need to know: Branding encapsulates so much more than just your logo or what color choices you use on your company website. Branding means molding the experience your customers will have with you and molding the experience your employees will have with you. It means having a vision and a mission. It means communicating consistently across any platform you might touch. If you do not fully grasp your company brand, it will be very difficult to create any type of marketing campaign that will be truly effective.

If you do not understand ROI, your company could go broke and you will have no idea why.

As for various marketing tactics that have been declared dead, for some companies it may be true, for others it could not be further from the truth. Companies will benefit from researching from their own unique vantage point and seeing what will work best for them.

Social Media experts say…full-service agencies are not going to give you the best service possible

I just had this conversation this morning with author Jeremy Waite, who said, “Not a fan of “full service” as it often tends to be a compromise.” I have a feeling a lot of people may feel that way, unfortunately.

What companies need to know: If an agency, especially a one-person agency, says that they can do absolutely everything for you on their own, you should probably be suspicious. The strength of the agency in today’s modern world is that they can become a hub for your company. For example, our agency works with videographers, voice-over talent, SEO companies, printers, and other vendors. These partners add to our capabilities, and our ability to network with these companies takes the strain off of the clients we work with. We do the back-and-forth, we interface on behalf of our clients, and we inform our partners when it comes to our clients’ expectations.

That being said, we can also offer a lot in-house. We can create literature, press releases, advertisements, booth graphics, websites, and more. We call ourselves a full-service marketing firm but only offer the strongest solutions to our clients. If that means we need to network with a vendor, hey, we do that. I’m sure many other agencies and marketers do as well. The ones that do not are the ones that give all of us a bad name.

And remember – something as simple and banal as proofreading takes two people. If a person is claiming to be a one-person marketing master, your alerts should buzz at level red.

Agencies and Social Media people say…the other guys do nothing but offer silver bullets

Whether the words used are along the lines of “Snake-oil salesmen” or “complete rip-offs,” you will often hear one group calling the other a bunch of charlatans.

What companies need to know: There are NO silver bullets. If someone offers to create a viral video for you, back away. If someone suggests you purchase online followers, back away. If someone says that x tactic that has worked for you for years “is dead,” back away. If someone says that social media is a fad, back away.

In fact, whether you are dealing with a social media expert or an agency person, there are a few key indicators that you can look for that will tell you to put your guard up.

• They sell their services to you based on how many Twitter followers they have

• They offer you a marketing proposal *before* talking to you

• They call themselves a guru – of anything

• They pronounce any marketing tactic as “dead” before talking to you

• They talk only about themselves

The list goes on and on.

The bottom line is that these are hard times. I don’t know if you noticed, but the world economy is still going through a pretty tough time (although there may be some faint light filtering through that end of the tunnel). What marketers, social media people, anyone who works with companies really need to focus on is how to help their clients. Yes, there is a fire hose of information to absorb. Yes, a lot of things are new, and a lot of the old things have changed. Just keeping up with all of that should be enough to occupy our time – so we can assist our clients.

If you help enough companies succeed, you won’t need to have a smarts contest on Twitter or on your blog. Your work will speak for itself. Whether you are rooted in the agency world, the social media world, or *gasp* both.

What do you think? Can we alter our focus away from the mad-dog-attack-everyone style and work towards helping companies succeed?

1st Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hodac/2268933474/ via Creative Commons

2nd Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/petesimon/3365916854/ via Creative Commons

I was taking a quick look at Twitter and this tweet from Guy Kawasaki popped up. It was an infographic about social media jobs.

“Well, what the heck,” I thought. I went ahead and clicked. This is what I found:

© 2012 Onward Search

I really just have one question, but I’m quite desperate to know the answer.

When did job titles like “SEO Analayst” and “PR” become “Social Media Jobs?”

Your feedback is much appreciated.

Something very interesting happened over the weekend, and I thought I would tell you about it. Actually, the really weird thing is that the same incident happened two different times with two different parties involved. As it happened, two different people, who I’m pretty sure do not know each other at all, sort of called me out in the public Twitter stream. One said I never talked to them and the other asked me why I wasn’t tweeting their blog posts.

Now, there are plenty of people in the world of social media who would say something like, “Ah, you must be doing something right. The haters are coming out to get ya.”

I’m not really keen on that sort of argument. If these folks felt like I was not treating them fairly, I have to listen to that. But it makes me wonder, as we continue to travel into the realm of 2012, if this side of my social media life will just continue to grow. Will more people start “calling me out” on Twitter and on their blog sites? Will more people feel free to randomly troll my posts? Is that what I have to look forward to?

The payoff

Now, the other interesting thing about this scenario is that I am not really sure how far my own particular path of online success can go. There are so many people above me in the social media lasagna that I’m not sure I could ever break through to that level of success. In fact, a lot of those folks still don’t even reply to me when I try to talk to them on Twitter or when I comment on their blog posts. The ceiling that I need to grasp onto is most definitely a Cathedral ceiling. Maybe the sky itself. Am I going to offer some new insight into the online world that has not yet been covered by a much more experienced, much more knowledgable, much more well-known person? I highly doubt it.

It seems to me that at this particular time, I’m headed towards a casino where I’m going to need to decide whether or not to make a huge bet. The bet is as follows: Is any level of success I will find online going to be worth the increasing amount of dissidence I will encounter as I strive for that success?

How many more readers can I get here on my site before I start getting overrun by people who disagree just cuz they can? How many more Twitter followers (who are not porn bots) can I gather before I start meeting unpleasantness on a daily basis?

My livelihood is not really based on doing this stuff. This is all volunteer, extra-curricular. Where is my ceiling for dealing with gratuitous unpleasantness, and how does that relate to my ceiling of potential success? Where does one outweigh the other?

I seem to be at a fork in the road, or getting to one.

Which path would you take?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/s3a/5352487145/ via Creative Commons

When you say you have an online community, what does that mean? I am asking myself this very question. I often say things like, “I have the best online community ever.” What do I mean when I say that? I had a long conversation with myself (I’ll publish the transcript of the interview later) and decided that when I use the word community, I mean the folks who tend to comment on my blog posts, whose posts I tend to comment on, the folks I talk to on Twitter, etc. However, that’s a pretty imprecise definition, right? I mean, a lot of people may comment on one post and never come back (hold back the tears, Margie, hold back the tears). I might talk a lot to a person when I first meet them online and then we may fall away from each other.

The word “community” can be even more ambiguous when used in a business context. It can also be a lot more dangerous.

Get online and build your community

How many times have you seen advice like that? “It’s all about networking.” “Think of the online world like it’s one great big cocktail party.” Heck, I’ve said stuff like that. For an individual, this advice is 100% perfect. Social Media gives you an opportunity to meet a person who knows a person that is connected to a person you just met. A new opportunity could be hiding behind any given avatar. Your bosom buddy might have just “liked” a post of yours on Facebook. Who can say?

But if you’re a business, networking is not really enough. There is one key caveat that gets missed and it’s at the company’s peril. You have to make sure that at least to a certain degree your “community” consists of people who are going to buy from you or who will entice other people to buy from you.

I say this as someone who has done a horrible job of keeping this in mind. If I was out here to build a “community” that would be fertile ground for new clients for our agency, I’d probably get a C-. Many of the people I talk to regularly are actually probably more accurately categorized as competition than potential competitors. And that’s the great big distraction in the online world. When you come out here, you join chats to meet people, as I did. But what do you know about chats? They draw people from similar fields and ways of thinking together. Your customers probably don’t think of things the same way you do. In order to build a community useful for your business, you actually need to visit the chats where your customers are likely to be.

I don’t think this gets pounded into peoples’ heads very often. When I joined Twitter, as I’ve recounted a few times here and there, I clicked on the categories of “who to follow” people. I like entertainment (who doesn’t) so I started following Michael Ian Black, Yoko Ono, and Rainn Wilson. I knew I wanted to network with business folks, so I started to follow Chris Brogan, Fast Company, and Reuters.

You’ll be shocked to learn that in my early days of tweeting, I never got any responses Yoko Ono, Michael Ian Black, or Rainn Wilson. And even if I had, what good would that have done for our business? Was Michael Ian Black going to suddenly decide he needed some B2B marketing advice? Highly improbable.

But that’s the way the online world leads us.

Community should not be about numbers

Another thing businesses need to keep in mind when we talk about the concept of online “community” is that numbers can be significantly distracting AND misleading in an effort to build a community of customers. Let me give you an example from my own online life.

Recently I got followed in short succession by a half-dozen or so Twitter accounts. All of them featured avatar pictures of mostly naked women, and all of the profiles said something along the lines of…well, there’s not really a polite way to summarize. Spam is getting well out of control on Twitter. So, while I could be really excited that I have x number of followers, I know a large portion of them are spam bots, bots, or people who may be bots but I can’t tell because they have eggs as avatar pictures.

Spam bots are not potential customers for your company. If you are telling your boss (or yourself) that your community is growing by leaps and bounds and hence your business should be doing really well any day now, you are really fooling yourself.

“Community” is not bad

As we have discussed before, talking to people you like online is not bad, and if you are using online platforms to network or to meet new people, nothing beats having a sense of “community.” But if you are here to build your business, the number of people commenting on your blog or however you may define community can just be a big shiny distraction if none of those people will put their money in your company’s bank account.

It’s money, sadly, that makes the world go round. Building a community of customers, not just “a community,” is the path businesses must take in the online world if they want to remain in the black.

What are your thoughts about community? How do you define this word in regards to the online space?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/40727794/ via Creative Commons

I’ve spent an interesting day, as is so often the case, here in the online world. I had a very interesting conversation with Chris Young (@chris_eh_young), Brandie McCallum (@lttlewys), and Carrie Wilkerson (@barefoot_exec)  about various marketing myths that are floating about in the online world. For example, the fact that everything “is dead” is something we all agreed is really getting old. They are good people. You should talk to them.

This evening I read a post by Robert Gembarski, who I encountered by following Marieke Hensel to her blog site. The post is called How To Make Social Media Marketing Part Of Your Overall Marketing Plan. In this post there are some interesting statistics about business usage of social media marketing which made me want to do more research, and in the process of doing THAT, I discovered this rather amazing B2B research that Penton Media from here in Northeast Ohio did in 2011. I found the study via a post by Jeffrey Cohen which was just published last week. Now Jeffrey posted on what the study revealed about the world of B2B and its relationship with social media. Interesting stuff. But what catches my eye about this study is everything the survey participants did NOT know.

Here is a small sample. The survey was returned by 5,000 “executive level subscribers” 3,835 of whom said they were involved in their company’s marketing strategy.

• 41% said they did not know if their website used metadata or meta-tags

• 14% didn’t know whether they were using a link building strategy

• 14% didn’t know if their competitors were actively involved in social media

• 26% said they are not engaging in social media because they don’t know how to measure it OR were not sure it  would be valuable (we assume the worst about things we don’t know)

• 32% said they are unaware of how their company is talked about online

These are, according to the study, executive level subscribers of publications that range across 17 different industrial publications that Penton Media publishes. The majority of them have at least some role in marketing. And yet, they are unaware of these extremely significant facets of 21st century marketing within their own company and in regards to their competitors? That is pretty disconcerting, don’t you think?

The sad news

The really sad thing about these gaps in knowledge is that the doors are wide open for these survey participants to get misdirected in their marketing efforts. If they start listening to a lot of what is passed around in the world of social media, which often has no real basis in marketing and which is often based exclusively on the world of B2C, they may react in the following ways to their lack of knowledge.

 

41% said they did not know if their website used metadata or meta-tags; 14% didn’t know whether they were using a link building strategy

The lack of knowledge present in these two bullet points could easily be dismissed with a, “Well, you don’t really need a website now” answer. I see this more and more in the world of social media. There is a lot of buzz about how a blog or a Facebook page can serve as a company website or online hub. For some companies, this may be true. For the B2B world, I’m not sure it really is. The kinds of information a B2B company needs to make available often require administrator walls, dealer and customer log-ins, and more.

While SEO experts wax and wane about the importance of meta tags, there is little change when it comes to the importance of white-hat link building strategy. If you don’t even know if you have such a strategy, you and your website could be in big trouble. It would be tantalizing to think you could leave all of that behind and jump into the social media waters. I hope that companies hesitate and think before they make that leap.

14% didn’t know if their competitors were actively involved in social media

This information is extremely easy to find even if you don’t have any experience in social media. In many cases, all you have to do is Google a competitor or a person whom you know works for a competitor. Does their LinkedIn profile show up? A Twitter account? Beyond that there are PLENTY of ways to conduct searches to find out this information. If you are unsure of how to search, talk to an agency or consultant who knows how and where to look for key competitors in the online world.

26% said they are not engaging in social media because they don’t know how to measure it OR were not sure it would be valuable 

Many in the social media world would respond to this and say, “Well of COURSE it will be valuable. You’ll expand your reach and the measurement will be easy to see in Twitter followers, blog subscribers, and Facebook fans.” Right?

Not so much.

Factually, there are plenty of ways to measure the success of your social media campaign – the ROI, even – but you need to have a plan, and a lot of folks in the online world find the concept of planning somewhat old-fashioned If you have a plan of what you want to invest and a goal for what you want to receive, your social medi marketing campaign can be extremely valuable. If you do your research first and make sure your plan has you working in fertile areas for company growth, you’ll be even more successful.

32% said they are unaware of how their company is talked about online

Again, this is extremely easy to explore. The new adage that “your company is being talked about already even if you don’t know it” isn’t necessarily true. There are plenty of companies who could only wish they were the topic of a Twitter conversation. But there are tons of ways to explore this online world and see if your company or brand names are coming up in conversation. You can even see exactly what people are saying about you.

Two Big Problems

The way I see it, there are two really big problems here. The first is that people in the c-suite are immersing themselves just enough in marketing to not have a 100% full grasp on it. This makes these people likely candidates for the social media silver bullet syndrome. When the money coffers are empty and the pressure is on, a silver bullet in the shape of a tweeting bird and a blogging Bonzo can look pretty good, right?

The other problem is that there are far too many people in the world of social media who will dismiss this lack of knowledge in the B2B world as nothing to be concerned about. Websites are old hat. Link building strategy is voodoo. It’s all about engaging.

What can we do about these two problems? That’s the real question.

What do you think?

By the way, you can download the study and analyze it for yourself. It’s available for free and is called Truth from the Trenches.

1st Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncene/385671543/ via Creative Commons

2nd Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uaeincredible/217849066/ via Creative Commons

Social Media should not be about you.

It should not be about you getting a high Klout score.

It should not be about you getting perks.

Social Media should not be about you gaining ground as you tear others down.

It should not be about you calling out everyone (and their mothers and their fathers.).

It  should not be about you scraping money off of people who believe you can help them.

Social Media should not be about you building your case as to why you are the greatest human ever.

It should not be about you making a list.

It should not be about you bad-mouthing a list you didn’t make.

Social Media should not be about you and your ego.

It should not be about you finding a platform where  you can feed unadulterated BS to other people who may buy it.

It should not be about lying to see if you can get away with it.

Social Media should not be about you recreating definitions to better suit your purposes.

It should not be about you offering silver bullets.

It should not be about you maliciously spreading rumors that ruin peoples’ lives.

Social Media should not be about you. It should be about the people you help, the companies you grow, and what you are able to accomplish with this new and powerful tool.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foenix/1327718719/ via Creative Commons