Marketing Talk

I had a dream last night that I think was actually was my brain trying to figure out this whole social media experience – the part that I really enjoy.

In the dream, I was on a field trip, kind of like school but everyone was all grown up. I, along with a mass of other people, were going to this gigantic museum, and everybody spread out to all floors and all galleries. I was with a small group and we were all looking at the same things, but I’d get little messages from people in other parts of the museum. “This is what I’m looking at” or “What you’re looking at sounds pretty neat!”

I realized that this is really what the sharing aspect of social media is like. We are all doing our own things in our own galleries, but then we find something to share and we send that thought over to people in another gallery. Meanwhile, those folks are popping back messages about what they’re seeing and experiencing.

Before you know it, you start to look forward to those updates from other galleries, those updates from those other people, and even though you’re traveling in all different directions in no specific order, you’re all still in the same museum, exploring different galleries and sharing what you learn.

If you were to ask me why I like social media, that sharing aspect would be my first answer. Learning what other people have learned, getting new perspectives on what I have learned. This part has nothing to do with business (although sometimes it could). It’s just about being in this gigantic space and saying, “Hey, what’s on your mind?”

What do you think?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orangebrompton/6940597124 via Creative Commons

A few years back, before I really got super involved in Twitter and Blogging, I accidentally got involved in Farmville. Actually, to be truthful, I started as a Farm Town girl, but of course, being the trend-bucker that I am, all of my friends ended up playing Farmville. I eventually caved in.

If you’ve never played the games, the concept is oddly simple. You plant crops, you harvest them, you sell them, and you get to buy things like a farm house, fences, pigs, and other things. It starts out so easy. Then you realize that to move up a notch, you need to start planting even more crops and harvesting more often. Oh, and if you don’t harvest on time, your crop wilts and you have to start over again. In short, it’s an OCD person’s nightmare.

One morning, a morning in which I found myself awake a half-hour early so I could harvest fake corn and plant fake grapes, I realized that this was getting pretty ridiculous. I was losing sleep so that I could make sure I got my seeds planted so I could harvest them during my lunch hour. A game was controlling my sleeping patterns!! I quit cold turkey and I’ve not touched a Zynga game since then.

There’s a bit of a problem, though. While Farmville no longer claims my heart, social media has. I’ve given up a lot of stuff to get to wherever it is I am now. I’ve stayed inside instead of enjoying days in the sun. I’ve missed television shows I enjoy. I’ve even, I’m ashamed to say, let my ice cream get a little melty on occasion. I feel like I should stop “doing social media” for awhile so I can remember what I used to do before I had this blog. But things are different now. There are two websites I’ve committed to writing to. There are people who support my posts and so I feel like I should support theirs. A publisher has sent me two books in the last month that they’d like me to read and review.  This has become serious stuff.

How did THAT happen?

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus is a story written by philosopher Albert Camus. Sisyphus must push a huge boulder up a mountain and just as he gets near the top, the boulder rolls down and he has to start over again.

That’s kind of what my social media journey has been like. Let me explain.

When I first started this social media thing, my goal was to get enough Twitter followers so that I wouldn’t totally humiliate myself while doing a presentation about social media. I didn’t have an exact number in mind, but something that was at least semi-decent. I reached that goal, but the boulder fell back down.

Now I wanted to start blogging, and I wanted people to start commenting. That took a lot of pushing and a lot of hard work, but I got that boulder almost to the top of the mountain. People started commenting. But the boulder fell back down.

Now I wanted to get 100 followers on Twitter and I wanted to get retweets of my posts. I reached those goals. But the boulder fell back down.

Now, I have a pretty darned good situation here in the online world, and I feel like once again I’m pushing that boulder almost to the top. But now I have a new problem that’s making the boulder fall back down.

I no longer feel confident I’m going to be able to keep up with everything I’ve built here. I write for three sites, sometimes more, in any given week. People are following me faster, which means that going through those folks one by one  to follow back as I’ve always done is taking more time. I don’t see as much on Twitter anymore, so I need to take more time to find good conversations and good stuff to share. People seem to be attacking me more, and that really makes that darned boulder feel heavy.

And did I mention I also have an exercise boulder and a work boulder and a “Hey I want to sit on my butt and watch TV” boulder?

This is getting heavy, man!

Can I just quit?

Of course, all of the stuff I’m doing is not like Farmville, which was really just a bizarre way to spend one’s time. All of this “stuff” is a way to further my career. It’s a way to learn on behalf of our clients. It’s a way to help me grow as a person. Still, we humans tend to need breaks, right? Sometimes we need to drop the boulders. Right?

Hmm.

Factually, I think I have too many commitments to be able to do that with a clear conscience. It’s not about writing here. It’s not about tweeting to keep my Klout score up. It’s about fulfilling things I’ve promised to do for other people. It’s about continuing to read and learn and grow. It’s about following through.

Sure, the world wouldn’t end if I took a month away and just said, “Aw, to heck with this.” But that’s not really how life works, right? You’ve gotta keep pushing those boulders. I just didn’t think the top of that darned social media mountain would keep moving around. Rather than there being an endgame, there seems to only be times where things will move faster and faster.

I’m not complaining

These are great problems to have. Each path up the mountain brings something new. But who would have thought that two years engaging in something would make it such an integral part of one’s profession and life? Kind of funny how that works.

Are you pushing boulders around on the social media mountain? How’s your journey going? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuinkabouter/3869336890/ via Creative Commons

When I first started tweeting and blogging, the big thing everybody was talking about was, “You need to network and really engage with people.” That seemed to be the end-all and be-all of most social media advice you got. This advice was offered regardless of your business. If you were a marketer – you needed to engage. A lawyer? You’d better engage. A salesman for cans of dried soybeans? Yep. You’d better engage.

The problem I’ve had with this is that just talking to people makes marketing (or selling) kind of difficult. If I ask you how your ill family member is doing, you might like me better as a person, but will that make you buy from me? Not necessarily. In fact, in that kind of scenario, what I do for business is probably the last thing on your mind.

Now, the tide is turning and we are trying to talk about social media as just another marketing channel. However, I fear that there are some big steps missing in this transition. How can we go from just “talking” to actually using social media as a marketing platform?

What is marketing?

Initially, I was going to make this post primarily about the dichotomy between “talking to people” and marketing. I asked my Facebook crew how they defined marketing. I got a wide diversity of answers, only a few of which were the results of me knowing some very smartypants people (i.e. marketing is lying, marketing is a myth). I lead a hard life. Anyway, here are some of the answers I got:

“Building a structured awareness of a product or service to a targeted buyer.” ~Bob Reed

“Marketing is basically everything behind the process of creating lifelong customers.” ~Olivier Blanchard

“For me, marketing encompasses everything from POP, packaging, media to the person the company hires to deliver their widget to the masses, but I’m pervasive that way.” Molly Cantrell-Kraig

“Marketing is the art and science of communicating the value of your product or service to prospective and current customers.” ~Sean McGinnis

“Influencing (positively and/or negatively) consumer behavior through targeted messaging.” ~Andree Cojocariu

I also remembered that while back Heidi Cohen had gathered insight into how people defined marketing. Heidi notes that the American Marketing Association defines marketing thusly:

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

I guess they should know.

So, I had my definitions of marketing. But then my friend Nic Wirtz threw me a little curveball. He said, “I’m stuck. Social media is mainly ‘talking/engaging with people’.” If that’s true, I began to wonder if social media “marketing” is really an appropriate phrase to use.

The catch with marketing on social media

Here’s the big problem. With so much emphasis early on focusing on “engagement” and “the conversation,” marketing got framed as bad, as did selling. If by sheer chance you talked to someone who needed a car and you sold cars, then you were the beneficiary of social media serendipity, but I’m not 100% sure that’s marketing, at least based on traditional definitions. If you talk to people a lot and they know who you work for but you never talk about business, you might be sharing value with potential customers, but it’s a value that does not always tie directly back to your business.

Knowing that most companies need to make money in order to survive, some companies have tried to barge into social media communities with a strong “buy me” message. Note what happened, for example, when Toyota decided to message countless people with promotional messages around Super Bowl time. These kinds of ploys make people feel like marketers and marketing are yucky (professional term). Note, for example, how Dan Perez reacted when marketers started jumping onto the Pinterest bandwagon. Certainly those kinds of tactics aren’t positive either.

So, if talking to people is NOT marketing and marketing on social media sites is evil, what do we mean when we say “social media marketing?” Is this some sort of hybrid created by Dr.Xavier in his secret hideout?

Social Media Marketing

This is a case where, honestly, I really don’t have a 100% solid answer. Wikipedia defines social media marketing as: “The process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.” That could well be part of it, but the purpose of marketing is really to create sales, right? I mean, that’s what you’re hoping for. Maybe this is how people got so confused about ROI. If you are driving traffic to your website, it may look like your social media marketing campaign is a success. However, if all of those people are visiting and then leaving without buying (or maybe without even coming back) you’re in a bit of a pickle.

So, if we can agree that marketing is NOT talking to people, and if we can agree that marketing on a lot of social media sites is most definitely frowned upon, and if we can agree that social media marketing ultimately needs to drive sales, how are we defining social media marketing?

Or am I just crunching my brains over a peanut?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away (It was actually on Twitter) I was engaging in a chat about branding. I was having a ball. It was the highlight of my life.

Well, okay, maybe not. But still, I was having a lot of interesting little side conversations, only a few of which were about pixie dust. Suddenly a person tweeted to me that they thought their logo was just fine, or something along those lines. I said, “Well, that’s great. I’m sure your logo is very nice too. But we are talking about branding, which is a lot more than your logo.” The person responded with something along the lines of, “Oh, I didn’t realize that.”

I have seen other people with the same kind of misunderstanding about what branding is. Some people feel that a person can be a brand if they have a website in their own name (like I do). Some people feel that branding is the color scheme you use to represent yourself. All of these may be small pieces of the branding pie, but it’s not the whole story.

Branding Defined PSM (Pre Social Media)

A lot of marketing definitions have changed since people not as familiar with marketing began to engage heavily in social media marketing. To help balance this, I decided to look back to a resource from 2004 – a webinar by William Arruda for MarketingProfs from November of 2004. Twitter didn’t exist yet, Facebook didn’t exist yet, and blogging was still rather new. How did we define branding back then?

General Definition

Branding is essentially defined thusly: A Unique Promise of Value. This means that you know what you can expect from this brand. You will always have a consistent experience because the value being offered and the message that is being focused on will forever be the same. This is one reason why being a “personal brand” is sort of counter-intuitive. We’d get kind of creeped out if a person acted the same way every time we encountered them, right? Or if they said the same thing every time we talked to them (generally)? Yikes.

Brand Discovery

The first people that need to define your brand are the ones behind the brand. Discovering your brand encompasses all of the following:

• Knowing your competitors

• Knowing your peers

• Identifying your target audience AND knowing what they want

Once you define the boundaries of your brand, you need to determine your brand’s mission, your values, and your vision. You also need to be open to the fact that after defining these things, your audience, your competitors, and your peers can impact your brand. Your audience may alter their expectations or desires of you, for example, or your competition may offer a new product or change pricing.

Communicating your brand

Letting other people in on what your brand is about can only be done once you, well, know what your brand is about. Now, when you communicate your brand, things like your logo can help, especially in terms of helping people recall what you’re all about. But they aren’t (hopefully) just recalling that your logo has a bird in it. Hopefully they’re recalling that they’ve heard really good things about you or, “Oh yeah, that’s the company that always says they’ll honor pricing from any other store.” Your logo, your marketing, your communications always revolve around your mission, your vision, and what people can (or should) expect when they work with you.

Branding in the world of social media

One thing it’s important to remember – as you build your brand in the online world, you don’t want to send out messages that completely confuse people. For example, you don’t want to use your Twitter feed to talk about how great vegetarianism is and then pepper your Facebook wall with the delectable rack of lamb you served up for dinner (well, I don’t know what kind of brand would send out both of those messages, but you get the idea). Moreover, you want to make sure that your social media communications aren’t contradicting what you’re saying in other marketing channels. If you have a true grasp of your brand value, this should not be problematic, of course.

What did I miss?

How else would you define branding? In what other ways does the concept of branding expand beyond your logo? I’d love your input!

Don’t forget, this is part of a series called Alphabet of Marketing Myths (this is letter L). You can catch up on the whole series here.

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