Marketing Talk

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

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

During what I call my “summer of chats,” I, as you might guess, participated in a lot of Twitter chats. So many, in fact, that I now call that time period my “summer of chats.” Ehem. I was participating in chats because #blogchat had introduced me to the fact that Twitter chats are great ways to meet people with similar interests, share ideas, learn, and network. So, I participated in #blogchat on Sunday, #mmChat (Marketing Monday) on Monday, #leadershipchat and #Custserv on Tuesday, #imcchat on Wednesday, and #b2bChat on Thursday.

It was a lot of chats.

In terms of my social media presence (or “stuff” as I like to call it) all of these chats were great. But there was one little flaw with my great plan, and I bet you may be falling into the same trap.

You see, by participating in chats with “people like me” I was actually networking with peers or even competitors. I was not participating in chats where potential customers were likely to be hanging out.

That whole community and being human thing

A lot of emphasis has always been given to the power of community in the online world, and with good reason. When you find yourself participating with a specific group of people in lots of conversations and chats, it’s pretty nice and it can even be pretty powerful. The online world is a great place to meet great people, to share ideas, to learn how to expand your business, and more. But the shiny factor in this part of the online world can really take your eye off your ultimate purpose if you are using social media for business. You need to be looking for people who will buy from you.

Now, in my own online community, I can count as friends many great people. Some of them are PR experts. Others are marketing or SEO experts. Others are social media wizards. I wouldn’t trade any of these folks for the world, but do you think it’s likely that a full service agency person is going to contact me, a woman from a full service agency, to do some work? It’s possible, but not highly probable. They might like me a lot, but our services simply are not what they are going to need.

The Serendipity Factor

A lot of people, when talk about online communities comes up, notes that you never know who one person may know. Any person you meet could end up referring a person they know to you. That’s true to a certain extent, but if you are networking solely with people who are in the same business as you, is it likely they are going to send that person to you when they could just as easily earn that person’s business? People are good, but not usually that good, especially during these trying times, right?

This logic applies regardless of the business you’re in. If you’re a lawn and garden person who has networked with other lawn and garden people, you’re not likely to get a lot of new customers. If you’re a jewelry maker who has networked with a lot of other jewelry makers…well you see where this is going. Yes, a person might give you a referral if a person would benefit from local or person-to-person attention, but beyond that, your sales will probably not see a bump.

So what should you do?

You don’t have to ditch the idea of networking with peers (or competitors). It’s still fun to meet people who might share similar life experiences. Just make sure that you balance that part of your online presence with what will pay your bills. Try to find some chats that might be of interest to existing or potential customers and get yourself known in that crowd. Do searches to try to network with people who are asking the kinds of questions you can answer. Focus some of your content on the stuff that would be of interest to existing and potential customers, not just to your colleagues and competitors.

Now it’s your turn

What has your experience been with building sales in the online world? Have you kept that as a priority or have you found yourself networking more with people in the same business as you? How have you balanced your goals? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkmoose/85013785/ via Creative Commons