Marketing Talk

For as long as I can remember, I have been enchanted by the Civil War. I have found it morbidly fascinating that families could split up and kill each other, and yet armies across rivers would chat about how much they wanted to go home. I have always been enamored of Abraham Lincoln, and find it amazing that he was extremely unpopular in the North as well as the South throughout the duration of his presidency.

There is a lot to study in the Civil War. There were innumerable technological patents issued. Medicine, by necessity, took great strides – the idea of sterilizing the surgery environment was born out of that series of tragedies in our history. Military history, too, was altered by the American Civil War. All of these new, immensely powerful weapons were introduced and handed to soldiers right in the middle of battle. But the commanders of those armies – they only knew what they had learned at West Point. They knew the bayonet charge, the cavalry charge. They knew that to defeat an army you had to come right at them. This knowledge, these things that were seen as “givens,” explain in part why casualties ran so high as the war dragged on. People were charging at armies that had minnie balls. People were charging, literally, right into firing squads.

As historian Shelby Foote says in the series, the weapons were far beyond the tactics.

The same holds true when it comes to Social Media.

Social Media and business

These days, it seems, we are approaching advertising and marketing in the same way we always have – as sales pieces. Some companies are bringing these traditional methodologies to Twitter and Facebook and Blogs. This is like trying to use antiquated military strategies when all of the technology has changed, and literally, companies that approach Social Media incorrectly will get blown out of the water. No one expects the hard sell on Twitter unless it’s 100% clear that’s your reason for being there, and even then you might find yourself entirely ignored.

We have created these new technologies before understanding the strategy needed to make them work. I think of Jeff Goldblum’s line in the first Jurassic Park movie. Companies are moving into Social Media because they can without thinking whether they should. Well, he didn’t say that exactly, but you get the point.

Our weapons are ahead of our tactics, and our marketing strategies are suffering for it.

Social Media and society

All of this also holds true when thinking about Social Media and its effect on our modern society. There are about 27 posts I could write about this topic (and maybe I will), but for now, consider the following, and let me know your thoughts about them.

Social Media has created new job opportunities, but we don’t really have names for those new jobs

Social Media has created new ways to communicate, but we don’t really have a name for this new method of communication (is it networking? is it friendship?)

Social Media has created new ways to unite – look at what happened when reports of protest started coming out of Iran and Egypt.

Social Media has also created new and powerful ways for us to abuse each other, and we have no way to police that. We have no control. The weapons are ahead of our tactics.

The Learning Curve

By the time World War I approached, it had become apparent to most military strategists that the era of the bayonet charge had ended. World War I saw trench warfare and the use of poisonous gases. By World War II, of course, war had entirely changed again.

I don’t want to see our learning curve happen in parallel with countless missteps or tragedies. I don’t want to see companies fail because they are trying to blast out ads via 140-character tweets. I don’t want to see more people die because we have these powerful modes to communicate with no way to control them.

I am not asking for an authoritarian controlling mechanism in either case. But we need to stop and think, for the sake of our businesses and our society. What are we doing with this “Social Media” thing? It is a revolution. It is an evolution. That means we have to change with the technology. We need a road map. We need someone to write it. We need tactics that keep up with our technology. We need a strategy that can make the most of our actions. Right?

Note: This post was originally written on October 1, 2010. It has been refurbished for a new project I’m working on called History Lessons for the Social Media Practitioner.

You’d heard all of the rumors. Marketing is dead. B2B is dead. Computers are dead. Email is dead. Pretty much everything has been declared dead. Despite all of this, however, you did the unthinkable and started an email marketing campaign for your company. Today was the big day. The email was proofread and checked in every other way, loaded up into your program, and sent out. Now, 12 hours later, the boss calls and wants to know how the stats are looking (because yes, this does tend to happen in the business world). You might well scramble for your stats report and announce the first thing that is reported. “Well, our open rate was 19.2% which is *just* below what’s considered the industry ideal for open rate.”

There’s just one problem with this swift and exciting report.

It doesn’t really answer your boss’s question.

Opens are slippery

There are a few things you need to know about “opens” when you begin email marketing, and perhaps the most important thing is that the word “open” can be pretty misleading. For example, let’s say you check your email on one of those clients that has a preview pane. Whenever you get a new email it pops *open* in your preview pane. Some email programs will track this as an open even though the person may not ever actually look at it. This is why some programs now also track “click to open,” which means the person actually clicked open the email to read it. This might be a little more encouraging, but it still doesn’t answer that question about how the email performed.

Opens are like impressions

Opens in email world are kind of like impressions in web world. Impressions translates to how many people put their eyeballs on your site. Opens translates to how many people put their eyeballs on your email. Neither of these are really solid metrics for determining how these tactics actually performed, however. If you walk into a store and don’t buy anything, does the store really care how many things you looked at or “opened”? Probably not. They want you to buy stuff. If you’re in business, you probably want people to buy stuff too.

What are you asking people to do?

Email marketing, like any kind of marketing, needs to be thought through. What are you asking people to do? What are you guiding them towards? If you are preaching at them, even if they agree with everything you say, there isn’t really a reason for them to click anything. They might nod their heads at their screens. They might even hit reply and say, “Hey, thanks!” But that’s about it. Neither of these actions will really help you grow your business.

An e-newsletter or an e-blast, to be effective, should have a strong call to action just like any other marketing tactic. You should take your readers by the hand and say, “OK, looky here. Now I want you to go to this specific page on my website and request a sample.” Or whatever it is you want them to do. Counting the number of people who do THAT is a much better way to measure your success.

Of course, the most powerful way to report on the success of your email marketing program is to report on how it increased sales. There are countless ways to encourage people to go from an email to a page where they can purchase something. You can include a special discount code, for example, so that it’s super easy for your sales team to track where the sale is coming from. You can track how many people who requested a sample actually ended up buying, and that sample page can be set up on a special page that only the email linked to.

People will only do these things, however, if you ask them, or even guide them. If you don’t mention that you want people to buy something, they will assume you just want them to read the email. If you’re lucky, they’ll do it.

Email is easy

Because many people view “opens” as the Holy Grail of email stats, there is I think a misconception that email marketing is easy. With all of the websites out there to help you design your email, it’s easy to think that you can just toss something together, get people to open your emails, and be on your way. However, in order to truly measure the success of your email marketing, and in order to make it a valuable part of your marketing campaign, a little more finesse, a little more planning, a little more thought needs to be involved.

What experience do you have in measuring the success of your email marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Have you ever heard of Jim Abbott? He was a pitcher during the years of my youth, first for the California Angels (that team that has nothing to do with LA, Oakland, San Diego, or San Francisco), and he pitched for a few other teams including the Yankees. This may not seem all that extraordinary until you learn that Abbott was born with only one fully developed hand. He learned how to perch his glove on his undeveloped hand while pitching and throwing so that he could field and throw players out in one fluid motion. Beyond all of that, Abbott also pitched a no-hitter, obstacles and all.

I saw a story on Abbott on Sunday Morning a few weeks ago, and the story focused on how Abbott is using his career to show kids with similar obstacles in their way that they can do whatever they want. The interviewer asked him if his hand had been on his mind when he pitched his no-hitter. Abbott said no. He was just a pitcher trying to accomplish what all pitchers want to accomplish. Of course, in the process of just trying to pitch his best, Abbott, through his actions, remains a shining example for kids who may feel hopeless or discouraged.

What does this have to do with blogging?

You might well be asking yourself what this all has to do with blogging. “Has Margie finally lost her mind? She’s just raving and ranting about Jim Abbott now.” Well, fear not, my furry feathery friends. I have a point.

In a parallel universe, Jim Abbott could have sat on the sidelines. He could have pointed out how sports were made only to accommodate “normal” people. He could have become bitter and angry and could have torn down pitchers who were born into an easy life. Of course, this would have made him a rather normal human being, but he’d have probably not become a known entity. He certainly would not have become part of the select group of people who, as professional pitchers, pitched a no-hitter.

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of bloggers seem to be taking this rather negative approach, however. There is an immense amount of focus on people who are offering bad advice, people who are doing this that or the other thing in a dumb way, bad this, bad that. And that’s fine. It’s part of the human condition to critique others, especially in a tight, competitive space like the online world. But what does this accomplish? It creates strife. It creates conflict. More than anything, it paints a negative portrait of just one person – the blogger.

My humble recommendation is that we in the online world take the Jim Abbott approach. Instead of pointing the finger at everything that is piled against us or everything that is wrong in the online world, perhaps we could focus more on the right way to do things. Perhaps through our actions we could guide people to where we feel they could or should go and emphasize that more than on the people who we feel are doing it wrong. Perhaps just by doing what we feel is best, we could serve as an example to the people who follow us about in this space.

Focusing less on the external

The other lesson that bloggers could learn from Jim Abbott is that we don’t need to worry as much about what others think about us and what we’re doing. This is something I’m certainly guilty of. Bloggers may wonder if people will like their voice. Will people think my advice is good or bad? Will I ever be one of the “cool kids” online? Jim Abbott could have worried about what people would think as he played first football and then baseball. He could have worried that people would make fun of his style, make fun of his hand, or stand in his way. But Abbott didn’t get hung up about any of that. He just did his own unique thing, unparalleled as it was in the world of professional sports. And he excelled.

Surely there’s a lesson there.

We all need to worry less about how we are perceived in this space. I fear we are all shrinking our potential impact by becoming too self-involved. What attracts me to social media is the capacity to share with others. If I want to talk to myself I can do that whenever I want (and maybe I do). Out here, it’s the amazing ability to share ideas and learn things. I really believe that, even still.

So what can we bloggers learn from Jim Abbott? Be your own self. Do your own thing. Instead of sitting and complaining about how much things suck and what d-bag x is doing now, shine your own light out there and make things better through your own actions. It’s an interesting concept, right?

Who wants to try it?

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It’s a bright and sunshiny day and you’re on your way to meet a prospect. You have your company’s portfolio, you’ve dressed the best way you know how, and you even brushed your teeth and combed your hair. You have so many butterflies you’re thinking about donating all of them to an arboretum. Then suddenly you’re there in the office waiting to get your meeting. You’re called in. You shake hands and sit down, and then suddenly you say, “I have my colonoscopy results here. Would you like to see them?”

This probably is not super likely to happen in the “real world,” and yet I see a lot of professional/corporate blogs that seem to operate in just this kind of scenario. The blog looks great, there’s a lot of helpful content, so I decide to check it out. Then all of a sudden I’m reading something that kind of makes me want to poke my eyes out. I was visiting you for business and now I’m reading something I wouldn’t necessarily want to know about my best friend.

So what’s the scoop here?

Forget about “professional brand” and “personal brand”

Often this conversation gets us into the “brand” jungle. If you want to “build your personal brand” you need to be really, well, personal. I’ve never really bought this line of thinking when it comes to people who are in the blogosphere for business, however.

It’s my opinion that when you are out here in the social media world, you ARE being the face of your brand. When someone thinks of your company, they now can say, “Oh yeah, so and so works there.” That does not mean that that person needs to think, “Ah yes…that company is where so and so works. Did you know that that person had a wart problem for the first 30 years of her life and that sometimes she really enjoys picking her nose?”

If you are blogging for business, logic states that your ultimate goal is to use your blog to somehow build or strengthen your business. That means your corporate blog should not be about you. It can be written in a personable tonality and it can include stories that help bring your posts to life, but over-sharing is not always a great way to bring people in. In fact, sometimes over-sharing can be a good way to keep people out.

For example, let’s say you decide to write a post, as a CEO, about how poor your health has been. You’ve been in and out of the hospital for the last 3 years, you’ve missed a ton of work, and it’s just wearing you down. As a blog post, this will probably drive a lot of traffic to your site and you’ll probably get a lot of comments, too. But what message does this send to a person considering doing business with you? No matter how hard we try to think otherwise, the message being sent here is, “Maybe I shouldn’t start building a business relationship with you right now.” That person may even leave a wonderful comment for you. But so far as your business is concerned, you may not be doing yourself any favors.

“I know who I want to attract”

A common argument in support of blogging about whatever you want to blog about is, “Well, I know what kinds of people I want to work with. If you’re offended by what I write, we probably wouldn’t have gotten along anyway.” That can most certainly work for some people, but during these trying economic times not everyone can afford to pick and choose. Money looks the same and spends the same no matter who you get it from, and I’d even go so far as to argue that part of the fun of business is learning how to get along with people who might be different from you. If you’re strongly religious, it might be good, as a business person, to learn how to function with those darned pagan types. If you’re a “liberal lefty” it might do you some good to learn how to operate efficiently with a far right Republican.

Why limit yourself to “who I like to work with”? This has never seemed entirely realistic to me. In fact, I might even go so far as to call it unrealistic or even bad advice.

Of course, I’m always open to hearing other opinions. I expect to in this case as this tends to be a hot button issue in bloggy world. So – voice away!

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