Marketing Talk

After weeks and weeks of being haunted about Klout by friends like Cristian Gonzales, Tom Moradpour, Chase Adams, and Maya Paveza, I decided that maybe I should give the thing a fair look with a wide open mind. I thought I would do so in a public venue so that I could share my experiences with you. I hope to hear your thoughts too!

It seems like this week was one of THOSE weeks for an awful lot of people. I think everyone is ready to unplug for a few days and spend time with the people who matter most to us. Amidst all of the fatigue and stress, I’ve seen a lot of blogs and tweets this week about things that are wrong with Social Media. I get it. Earlier this week I was right there with you. But all things told, when I sit down a week from yesterday, just before I begin to stuff myself as if I was the turkey, I will express gratitude for this space, along with many other things in my life.

I started this blog almost exactly 7 months ago, which is also when I started taking Twitter a bit more seriously. I am thankful for so much about what the last 7 months have brought me, and so, even though it seems negativity is the order of the day, I’d like to take note of some of the positive things I’ve garnered from my Social Media experience so far.

1.  I was able to engage in real-time chats with people in all different facets of the marketing in world in which I live and work. I would not have my ideas sharpened, challenged, honed, and molded. Not just “Twitter chats” officially, but chats with people just haphazardly because we were online at the same time.

2. I was able to witness the beautiful process of people evolving from unsure to leaders, from strangers to key community members. People like @grit08 and @gagasgarden, who both introduced themselves to me as unsure of how to “do” Twitter, are now integral members of my community and the communities of many other people.

3. I have been able to watch networking in action like I never would have been able to witness before through people like @CateTV and @MayaREGuru. It would be enough if folks like these were just friends with you, but they introduce you to other people. They forge connections for you when you don’t even know you’re looking. It’s a wonder to watch.

4. I have been able to read books and then converse with the authors. When does that happen?

5. I have written words. A lot of words. And people have done me the immense honor of not only reading but also responding. It is a perpetual gift of time and effort and thought for which I am immensely grateful.

6. In the short time I have been in this space, I have seen three successful fundraisers for people in need. I’m sure there are tons more that are just beyond my radar.

7. Social Media has helped me keep abreast of the ever changing world that is Social Media, which has helped me keep our clients aware of what is going on where.

8. I was able to find extremely helpful forums for advice and growth – Third Tribe and 501 Mission Place, because of my involvement in Social Media.

9. I have been able to start a new blog and a weekly chat with the intent of addressing bullying, and I have been able, already, to help network people who need help with people who can help. I could not have done that without Social Media.

10. I not only have had the privilege of befriending people like @pushingsocial, @mentormarketing, and @dwesterberg, @j2_whittington, and @galactic, but I have watched all of these people, and more, evolve into true leaders. The opening was there for them to grow and develop into leaders, and they charged right on through.

11. I have watched my friend @REALChaseAdams create one of the most innovative and fastest growing groups I’ve seen on Twitter and on Facebook.

12. I have been able to watch friends like @exopoirier, @suzannevara, and @SMSJoe receive acclaim for talents and leadership I already had seen in them. Few things are more rewarding.

13. I have been able to place before myself a challenge of building a community out of the millions of people using a site called Twitter. I have worked hard and have begun to carve out a cozy community for myself, where I can alternately quote Barry Manilow and talk about Google Analytics. Sometimes all in 140 characters.

14. I have been able to witness acts of kindness that would be hard to find in the offline world. People have said things to me that have made me teary-eyed for the kindness of it. People have done things for me, unasked for, unexpected, because they wanted to help me succeed. Where else does that happen?

15. And yes, on Turkey Day, I will be thinking with wonder about all of the amazing, talented, kind, brilliant people I have met in less than 1 year. Was there really a time when I didn’t know Tristan, Deb, Jeannette, Ann, Beth, Marsha, Roy, Lisa Alexander, Mack, Tom, Tommy, Kyle, Allen, Chris, Stan, Maya, and Suzanne? It was only 7 months ago? How this community of people has enriched my life, my work, my professional goals and skills, the way I think, the way I live. Truly, if you can’t be grateful to Social Media for anything else, you can be grateful that it can give you an opportunity to meet golden people like these.

I know that the times are hard and uncertain still. Numbers in the WSJ don’t always tell the whole story. But it is during tough times that days like Thanksgiving are especially important. It’s when times are tough that it seems easiest to talk about what stinks about this, that, or the other thing. And Social Media is by no means perfect. There are plenty of times when I think about throwing my computer out the window. But truthfully, Social Media has been a road to too many good things, too many good people.

If you think about it, I’ll bet the same is true for you.

I have always been a pretty competitive person, all things told. Starting in fifth grade, I decided I wanted to graduate in the top ten of my high school class. I always tried to sell the most cookies in Girl Scouts. I really got to be competitive on my high school speech team. I am not competitive because I want the ego massage. I am competitive because I enjoy the challenge of working darned hard and coming out on top.

The thing is, competition in the world of Social Media doesn’t do a darned bit of good.

Starting last week, I was feeling kind of frustrated with the whole Social Media experience. It seems like every day there’s a new list of people who are “the best of.” People are reaching various  benchmarks in 3 months that I haven’t come close to in 7. While I’m not here for the numbers, let’s face it – being named “one of the best” is always nice. Getting to certain benchmarks that everyone recognizes as good benchmarks is a nice boost.

I talked to some friends and I basically had the same message for all of them. “Man, I don’t know if this Social Media game is for me.” They asked me why I thought that. I named various reasons. “I don’t know, I mean, I look at so and so and they always seem to get retweeted and tons of comments.” “I look at this person who does things totally differently from how I would do them and they are getting accolades like you wouldn’t believe.”

What my friends helped me realize, and what I would like to share with you on this, my almost seven-month anniversary of this blog, is that Social Media really cannot be about how other people or companies are doing. Here are some reasons why.

1. People have all sorts of different goals. I can’t say, “I want to bring in x number of new clients through this medium.” In my business, as in so many, one new customer can take you to new levels of success. So can 27. A certain number of subscribers or followers or fans isn’t really going to help me out in terms of our agency. For other people, number of subscribers means amount of traffic, means amount of times ads are seen, means more clicks and more money.Those sets of goals could hardly be more different.

2. People have been doing the Social Media thing for all kinds of different amounts of time. I have friends who have been playing this game from the beginning. I have friends who started a couple of months ago. Social Media, like gardening, is an act of growth and patience.

3. People do Social Media differently. I am not a big fan of promoting myself. I like to be out there, I like to push out content, but my business goal is not to sell me. My business goal is to be present so that when someone needs help with something that we can do, they will say, “Oh, doesn’t Margie work for her family’s agency?” My personal goal is to continue to meet amazing people and to help people acclimate to this space in a more easy fashion than what I experienced. Other people will push and promote and do all sorts of things, and that’s not wrong. But they will get very different results from what I get, most likely.

Social Media is not like a 100 yard dash. It’s not about speed. It’s not about getting to a single finish line that everyone recognizes as THE finish line. Social Media is more like a marathon. It’s about setting personal goals (and/or professional ones) and striving towards those. Did you hit your mark with that blog you just wrote? Are you hitting your mark when you Tweet? You can’t really look around when you’re running a marathon and get an idea of how you are doing.  All that matters is how are you feeling and whether you will make it all the way through the race.

It’s hard, in this world, not to concentrate on how other people are doing. Other peoples’ bent towards promotion can be distracting sometimes. But the wise counsel of my friends is resonating in my ears. Steady is what wins this race, as if the race ever really ends. I am going to keep doing the best that I can. I’m going to keep trying to run that mile in a shorter and shorter time. I’m going to look straight ahead. I will run the race with you,  but I am not trying to win.

Image by Denise Magditch. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/serenacowd

There is an awful lot of content out there about what agencies can’t do. These posts or articles always seem to attract a lot of attention and retweeting and what-not. I think it may be because a lot of them are framed in a “this or that” kind of way. For example, “If you want to have control of your brand, don’t use an agency,” or “This is the way the cool people do it, but you could also use an agency.” Now, I don’t take these posts personally, per se, because I know that these posts and articles have nothing to do with our company. However, I do think I need to set a few things straight, at least based on my own experience, which, by the way, is with an agency. So, here are three “agencies can’t” statements I see quite often along with my opinion on the matter.

Agencies can’t help you control your brand: The other side of this coin is that agencies can help you build a brand. With the ability to look at the big picture, meaning cross-channel, agencies can advise you on how to build your brand, whether it’s for a new company, a new product brand, or even a personal brand. Understand, agencies do not take take ownership of your brand (if they are doing things right), but they can provide you with the information and tools to build and control your brand. I know it’s trendy right now to imagine that all agency people are heavy-breathing, dapper, whiskey-drinking dudes who let their ego get in the way of what’s best for you and your brand, but, sadly, this is not true across the board.

Agencies can’t keep up with new technology: If you have ever worked for an agency that had a will to survive, you know the fallacy of this statement. In fact, an agency’s life depends on keeping up with new technology, and in my experience, “living” is very important for both businesses and people. When I was a little girl, which was not ALL that long ago, the artists at our agency had huge shelves full of markers. Now we have computers. About 3 years ago, our designers were using Quark. Now we’re using InDesign almost exclusively. When I first started working for our agency, we were still sending PR via snail mail. We were placing space via a faxed order. Everything is email and digital now. This makes me sound like I’ve hit the century mark and am looking back on the good ole days. This is six years. All we do is keep up, and ahead of, new technology.

Agencies can’t find a role in Social Media: This I think is fed a bit by some agency folks, who are kind of running around like their pants are on fire. “We can’t do this omg the money the time and they want ROI on this we can’t do that omg omg.” Etc, ad infinitum. A marketing firm, or an agency, is responsible for marketing. Social Media is marketing (sorry folks, but it’s true. Saying that you are using Twitter for “professional reasons” does not keep you clean in this regard). In fact, agencies just need to get situated again, and companies need to view agencies as a new employee that has multiple heads, arms, sets of eyes, and sets of ears. We can help you listen, and we can offer you ways to respond to what you hear. We can integrate those responses into other marketing channels that we work on with you. We can help you create and manage accounts. We can help you create the content that will drive your Social Media engine.

To me, the pigeon-holing of agencies is about misinformation on the part of some people and some laziness on the part of some agency folks. It’s not easy doing the kinds of things I just talked about. It’s downright difficult to keep your arms around each new iteration of programs we use, not to mention the Facebook updates we hear about every 5 minutes, the Google updates we hear about every 10 minutes, and I’m not even going to mention mobile. But it can be done. We do it.

I was listening to the Future of Marketing Virtual Conference on Tuesday and was hearing a lot of brilliant people talk about, um, the future of marketing, actually. So that was apropos. It got me thinking though about the new year coming up. Although I am not a fan of New Years Eve, I am a big fan of new years. I think it’s a great excuse to shed off things you don’t need, build things up that could improve you or your life, and just really start off on the right foot.

To that end I am already compiling some wish lists for 2011. Part of my wish list is that the following categories of blog posts, which are everywhere here in 2010, pass away peacefully, only to be reviewed as relics of the past. And I’d totally hope that they would rest in peace.

1. Blah blah blah is dead. Stop killing things. Please. Advertising is not dead. Print is not dead. Websites are not dead. I’d be so happy, though, if posts about things being dead could be dead.

2. Blah blah blah is the new marketing. I’m not really sure why we need to rename marketing. Do we even know how we define marketing? I find these posts perplexing, so I would not be sorry to see them go.

3. I am too popular to blah blah blah. I appreciate the fact that as the powers of influence increase, so too do time commitments, travel expenses, and interactions with icky people. Therefore, your ability to follow, comment, write, breathe, eat, sleep decreases. If you have time to post about how you don’t have time to do other stuff, you probably have time to do other stuff.

4. Blah blah blah Zappos. Please understand, I totally get why there is so much buzz about Zappos. I think the company and Tony Hsieh are respectively awesome. However, there has to be at least one other company (Okay, other than Ford) who is doing good things. Right?

5. Why aren’t you doing blah blah blah?: I love advice, but the incriminating, “Hey you, weakling, do this now or else” kind of post is something that I think should be very retro as opposed to very nowtro.

So what are five topics you’d love to see nevermore starting in 2011? What posts are driving you crazy these days?

Image by Roger Kirby. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/theswedish

I peeped in on #MM (Marketer Monday) chat on, well, Monday, and someone said something that caught my eye. They said, “It really makes me frustrated when I go to the trouble of scanning a QR code and I get taken to a regular old website page that I could have just typed in myself.”

Darn right.

There are a lot of really nice and shiny tools out there, but I worry that people are gravitating towards those tools without thinking about how those tools could really make a difference. “If I use this shiny tool, my marketing will be awesome,” I seem to hear. Because people and companies are so desperate to use these new tools, they are using the tools for things the tools are really not meant to do. It’s like being really excited about your new car and then trying to use the new car to make a smoothie. Car is still awesome. Functionality in the smoothie realm – negligible.

Are you:

Using Twitter to coax people onto your “sell” page

Using your blog to publish news releases

Using QR codes to take people to your homepage

Using your company’s Facebook page to post product pictures

I’m just not sure these are the best uses for these tools.  If you really want to plan something dynamic for a shiny tool like a QR code or a Twitter account, take a step back and plan it out. The tools will remain shiny while you think about how you can best use them.

Are you using tools in the best way possible? Does the shininess of the tool mean that the action is automatically new and innovative? What do you think?

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/clix