Marketing Talk

Even if you do your best to avoid art and history, it’s hard to avoid the legacy of Michelangelo. Heck, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made sure of that. You’ve probably seen Michelangelo’s Statue of David, maybe his Pietá, and maybe his Sistine Chapel. As a side note, when I was in high school one of my peers asked our teacher where the other 15 chapels were. They had always thought it was the Sixteenth Chapel. But I digress.

Given all of his accomplishments, you might think I have a typo in my title. Why shouldn’t you be like Michelangelo? He did great work. He left a powerful legacy. Truthfully, though, Michelangelo made two mistakes over and over again, and his mistakes are not too dissimilar from paths I see people on in the online world.

Work first, everything else second

The kind of work that Michelangelo did was not easy. He was not an artist sitting in a comfortable studio, air conditioning blowing, brush flitting across the canvas. Michelangelo worked with marble and well, heck, he painted a huge ceiling. It is said that Michelangelo would work so persistently on his sculptures that his hands would begin to bleed. He wouldn’t eat much or sleep much. He didn’t like company. He’d stay in the same shoes or boots for so long that he would pull skin off his feet when he finally removed said footwear. By many historical accounts, while his work was beautiful, he was not a happy or pleasant man.

Is that really a great legacy to leave?

In the online world, you see a lot of people tweeting at seemingly all hours. People tweet about how they aren’t sleeping. I see tweets all of the time about how people worked right on through lunch, or people who worked so hard they forgot to eat for two days. You’ve probably seen things like that too.

Even if you are a great blogger…even if you are a highly successful speaker…is this the best approach to your work? Do you really need to upload photos of your anniversary dinner to Facebook? Do you really need to miss your kid’s baseball game while lamenting how much work you have to do on Twitter? I’m not convinced you do, but there seems to be this one-track mind sort of thinking about work that seems prevalent in the online world. You’re not really working hard unless your hands are bleeding, you have no real friends, and your feet are stuck to your boots.

I don’t really buy that line of thinking. I don’t really recommend it, either.

The ebb and flow of the leadership

It would have been hard for Michelangelo to live in more turbulent times. Every city state in Italy not only battled other city states, but they also had battles within. Florence was forever being caught in a tug of war between the Medicis and their rivals, and Michelangelo was one of many, many people who got caught in the cross-fire. Brought into the Medici household as a promising young artist, Michelangelo, for most of his life, went from works commissioned by the Medicis to works commissioned by their rivals. He committed to grand ideas by the Medicis that he really didn’t want to do only to discover that they couldn’t pay him. He’d work hard on a project for their rivals only to see Florence swing back towards the Medicis again.

In a lot of ways, Michelangelo was like a piece of driftwood in the sea of the times in which he lived.

I see a lot of people similarly caught up in the ebb and flow of social media leadership. A person will present herself as a staunch supporter of someone, but then when another influential person points out a problem with said someone, our friend will say, “You’re right, I agree with YOU. That person is dumb.” If the tide changes, the person’s loyalty will change again and they will go back to their original guru.

I’m not sure how much maneuverability Michelangelo had in his world. It was the great leaders who could commission his grand works. He was competing with Raphael, for heaven’s sakes. That was no easy task. But people nowadays, we have a lot of choices. We don’t have to drift from leader to leader. We don’t have to drift from clique to clique in the online world. And yet that seems to be what happens to many people. Their loyalties, their beliefs, their tonality, their views, change as the wind blows. Where on one hand they will encourage people to “call someone out,” on the other hand they will tell said person how great they are.

Is this a great legacy to leave?

Michelangelo today is remembered as a great master, but he is not usually remembered as a great man. How do you want your work to be remembered years and centuries from now? How do you want people to think of you? Being remembered like Michelangelo isn’t all bad. I have to believe there’s more to strive for, though.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/captainchaos/382029326/ via Creative Commons

Joan of Arc, much like Hildegard whom we talked about earlier in this series, was a woman of immense talent during a time when such things were rather hard for guys to wrap their heads around. She was born a poor peasant girl, uneducated, headed for a rather non-extraordinary life. If you know your history, that is exactly the opposite of how she turned out. She turned out to be a brilliant strategist, a religious hero, a great debater, and a staunch defender of her king and country.

There are a few things you could pull from Joan’s story as you sit down to blog. Consider:

Don’t be persuaded that you’re wrong: At 17, Joan of Arc started trying to visit the dauphin of France. She wanted to tell him that she had had a vision that she was to help him become king of war-torn France. Upon her first attempt to visit the royal court, Joan was laughed out of the room. How would you react if a teenage girl from a poor family came up to you and said that voices had told her to do stuff?  However, Joan was not discouraged by this reception. She relentlessly came back, wanting to let her dauphin know what her visions had revealed.

As a blogger, it’s extremely easy to be “laughed out of the room.” Especially if you are new, it can be hard to stand by what you say and think. Don’t let people push you to give up, no matter how influential they are in the online world. Hold true to what you believe and to what you are saying.

Create a new prototype: The Medieval world really didn’t know what to do with Joan of Arc. She was a woman and never pretended to be otherwise, but she dressed in men’s clothing and cut her hair short. This went against everything women were “supposed” to do. Certainly women couldn’t be great soldiers and retain the qualities of a pure woman at the same time. And yet somehow Joan managed to combine all of these traits. Not only that, but she became a great hero. There had been no one like her in any kind of memorable history, yet she did not let standards and guidelines suppress her.

As a blogger, it can be easy to look for a pigeonhole to stuff yourself into. You can try to blog like xyz blogger. You can talk about the same stuff as this group of bloggers. You can try to adapt a voice that’s like some other blogger you know. But there is nothing wrong with chucking all of the stuff that’s been done. Start with something new and uniquely you. Why not? You have a lot less to lose in doing so than Joan of Arc did in the 15th century, right?

Choose your allies wisely: In an extremely short period of time, Joan of Arc succeeded in liberating Orleans. Her dauphin, Charles, was crowned king (Charles VII). Despite all she had done for Charles, however, he quickly abandoned her once he ascended to the throne. He found her, perhaps, to be too militant while he wanted to make peace. Whatever his reasoning, Charles did not grant Joan more troops. She went off to attack Paris on her own, without his support. When she was captured, he did not try to rescue her.

Choosing allies as a blogger can be similarly risky. You may find that after helping someone find success, they quickly abandon you and pretend that their success is only due to their own efforts. While a “mission” and helping others is extremely important, self-preservation should also be in the mix somewhere. This is a lesson Joan had to unfortunately learn the hard way.

Don’t let other peoples’ smarts intimidate you: At the end of her life, Joan of Arc was put on trial before French clerics and scholars. They wanted to try to prove that she was not worthy of her heroic reputation. It would have been easier on them all if it had been proven that she was just crazy or otherwise unreliable as a heroine. Facing a panel of scholars might have convinced Joan from the start that she had met her match, but records show that she held her own, out-debating these men who had had so much more formal training than she. According to all accounts, she did not approach her trial as a meek underdog. She approached it as an equal.

As a blogger, there will be times that you will disagree with a person who perhaps seems smarter than you, who has more experience than you, who might have a bigger following than you. It can be easy, in these situations, to simply give in and abandon what you believe. After all, they know best. Don’t let other peoples’ smarts or experience intimidate you. Don’t let other people inspire you to believe that you are surely the one in the wrong.

Joan of Arc comes down to us as a one-of-a-kind woman who turned the tide of the 100 years war and reinvented how women could work in society. As a blogger, everyone, no matter who they are or where they come from, has the opportunity to change blogging forever. You can make any kind of impact you want. You can leave a footprint as big as the one Joan of Arc left on France, if you want. Stand your ground. Believe in yourself and what you are doing. And don’t let anyone think they can defeat you.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anthea/281700306/ via Creative Commons

The Middle Ages are quite an interesting era in human history. Probably what comes to your mind is knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, and Monty Python. Well, that last one is probably just me. At any rate, the knights and damsels are only a very small part of the story. Society was rather complex back in these times. Serfdom existed, nobles existed, the clergy was out there making everyone pay tithes. One thing that has always caught my interest is the old idea of paying homage. Here is a description for you:

“Homage is the most honorable service, and most humble service of reverence, that a franktenant¹ may do to his lord. For when the tenant shall make homage to his lord, he shall be ungirt, and his head uncovered, and his lord shall sit, and the tenant shall kneel before him on both his knees, and hold his hands jointly together between the hands of his lord, and shall say thus: ‘I become your man from this day forward [of life and limb, and of earthly worship,] and unto you shall be true and faithful, and bear to you faith for the tenements that I claim to hold of you, saving the faith that I owe to our sovereign lord the king’; and then the lord, so sitting, shall kiss him.” from http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng330/ceremonies_of_homage_and_fealty.htm

Pretty heavy duty stuff, right? When you paid homage to someone, you were literally saying, “I’m yours, man. Whatever you want me to do, you’ve got it. Just give me a nice bit of land and we’re good to go.”

I think in some ways this concept has trickled its way into the online world, but I am pondering whether we pay too much homage or too little.

What does online homage look like?

I think it’s easy to create a relationship online that looks like the 21st century version of homage. For example, if you are fairly new to the online world and a person with a big following reaches out their hand and helps you out, you are going to feel darned indebted to them. I know this from personal experience. For whatever reason, a lot of people who were well-established in the online world helped me out when I was still an online newborn, and two years down the road, I still haven’t seen my gratitude for that subside. So, when someone does you a big favor, if you are, say, nice, you want to repay that favor. In the online world this means talking that person up, commenting on their posts, sharing their posts…you know the drill.

But there can come a point where paying this kind of homage can get carried away, right? For example, if a person starts sending out information that isn’t 100% accurate and they are called out for that (even nicely), you might get carried away and say that nobody should criticize your pal. You might be mean to other people because you perceive they are being mean to your friend. You might even close your mind to other opinions that vary from this person’s. You paid your homage to this person and that’s that. End of discussion.

Then again, maybe we don’t pay enough homage

There are certainly people out there who get caught in the idolizing trap. But I think it’s also fair to say there are people who wouldn’t know a ceremony of respect if it came up and whacked them in the face. These folks always present themselves as “self-made.” Their blog has comments because they started writing such awesome stuff. They have a lot of Twitter followers because all they did was tweet for 17 days straight, right? Regardless of how many people helped them out, promoted their work, taught them things, answered questions, or cheered them on, these folks climbed the mountain based purely on their own skills, wile, and charm. Homage? Hardly.

Is there a healthy amount of homage to pay?

The approach that has worked best for me is something I like to call reciprocation. It’s a revolutionary concept, and something that certainly would have been alien to our Medieval ancestors. I can map it out for you in a pretty easy formula. Hang on, let me get my blackboard out. OK.

You do something for me + I do something in return for you = Reciprocation

Phew. Alright, so, that’s basically the trick there. Now, you don’t have to be OCD about this. It’s more sort of a gut feel. I try REALLY hard, for example, to make sure I respond to comments that I get here on ye olde blog. You took the time to read and comment, I try to reciprocate that by responding in kind. I don’t necessarily need to build you a shrine, but quid pro quo. If you promote a post of mine, I try to share something that you do. Maybe not *that minute* but I try to make sure I let you know I appreciate what you do. Sometimes I fail at this, and that makes me feel bad. So I try to work on it. I don’t tend to mindlessly worship anybody, nor do I tend to ignore when folks take time out of their busy lives to give me a boost.

Reciprocation seems like an okay compromise, at least for me.

But maybe I’m weird.

*cough*

So what do you think? Do we pay too much homage online or not enough? Where do you fall in this crazy medieval spectrum? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/1228875390/ via Creative Commons

A lot of people enmeshed in the online world like to refer gruffly to other types of marketing as “interruption marketing.” Predominantly, they are talking about advertising. Advertising “interrupts” your reading experience. It can certain interrupt your television watching or your radio listening (do people still listen to the radio?). On social media platforms, advertising can fall into the downright annoying category. Yes, a lot of arguments are floating around about why you should stop advertising. As far back as 2009, Business Week noted, “The vast majority of ads don’t register with consumers.” In a recent post for Business2Community, Patrick McDaniel notes that many people go up to him and say, “Yeah, I tried advertising. It didn’t work.”

In fact, a simple Google search for “advertising is dead” yields quite a few results:

Are all of these folks right? Is advertising dead? Does advertising just simply not work?

What does “work” mean?

Not to be glib, but exactly what were you expecting your advertising to do? False expectations can be a big problem for businesses and marketers. If you were expecting your advertising campaign to pull your company out of the recession, you probably found yourself disappointed. Similarly, if you thought advertising would make people like your product more, you were likely not satisfied with the results. As Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston note in Marketing in the Round, advertising is really best for direct marketing and building brands. If your objectives and measurement systems aren’t in alignment with those types of tactics, you’re going to run into trouble.

Why do people think advertising doesn’t work?

The most common reason advertising doesn’t “work,” I might hypothesize, is that people don’t really understand how to make advertising work. Advertising is more like a puppy, not like a cat. You can’t leave it alone and assume it will take care of itself. You need to plan your media placements carefully. You need to make sure you are hitting the right audience with the right kind of creative. And yes, you need to find ways to measure everything you’re doing.

When we recommend advertising programs to our clients, we present online ads as akin to billboards. People don’t click on banner ads much anymore, but they notice them, and if you are going to an industry website, seeing companies you want to learn more about can create an environment where clicks are more possible than in other places (like, say, CNN). We also recommend not using banner ads for sheer promotion anymore. Give people a REAL reason to click. Offer something that can answer a question or that can help your potential customers meet their objectives. If you are led to believe that an online banner ad will increase traffic to your website by leaps and bounds, you will probably end up believing that advertising doesn’t work. If you don’t capture click-throughs via a special landing page, you’ll end up on the same boat.

In print advertisements, it’s important to make sure your ad makes sense for your audience. Does your audience like copy-heavy ads that are more like advertorials or do they respond to graphic-heavy ads with very little copy? Do they like straightforward presentations or does their eye get caught by out-of-the-box creative? There are plenty of ways to test these kinds of approaches, whether it’s running two different ads in very similar publications or timing your ads for a Reader Study issue, where people can respond directly to your ad and say what they think about it.

Again, if you do not have a methodology for capturing leads from your print ad, you are likely going to believe that advertising doesn’t work. You need to find a way to attract readers to your website, and not just to your homepage. You need to drive traffic to a page where you can capture information. Incentivize this part of your program. Again, offer readers something that will entice them to click, whether it’s a free white paper, an e-book that answers a key question, or something else along those lines.

If you engage in a print advertising program with an expectation that you will immediately be inundated with sample requests and sales, you will again end up believing that advertising doesn’t work.

You can do social media and still advertise

Many people seem to draw a black-and-white contradictory picture between social media marketing and advertising. If you are on Twitter for your business, you clearly can’t also advertise. Right?

In fact, this kind of thinking is leading companies away from some really intriguing integrated marketing opportunities. Print ads could drive traffic to a Facebook page. A QR code on an ad could lead to a YouTube video. You could even invite people to answer a question they see in a print ad by contacting you on Twitter. The possibilities for translating interest in a print ad to engagement elsewhere could be almost endless, in fact. But the “this or that” mentality overshadowing marketers these days may cloud over all of that potential.

What do you think about advertising? Should people just give up on this type of marketing or is that crazy talk? What are your experiences with advertising? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

PS, this post is letter Q in the Alphabet of Marketing Myths series. You can catch up on the series here.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/colleen-lane/4989879689/ via Creative Commons

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