Marketing Talk

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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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?

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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.

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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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