Marketing Talk

Habit 2 in 7 Habits is called “Begin with the end in mind.” The ramifications for life outside Social Media are pretty obvious. This section dealt a lot with mission statements, but before you think you know everything there is to know about such things, let me tell you a little bit more about what I learned from this section, especially as it applies to Social Media.

Mission Statements Should Be Actionable

Whether personally or for your job, how many times have you sat down to write a mission statement and found yourself starting with something like, “We the People of XYZ Company…” You scrap that. I mean, that’s been done to death. Then you say, “OK, OK…I’ve got it. We are going to be the best xyz company ever.” Well, that’s hard to promise, and it’s also hard to act on. By the time you’re done you might be really frustrated. You might write, “We will eat fried chicken every Wednesday and we know we will because we already do. HMPH!”

I think mission statements for your personal life or for your business are extremely difficult, but when it comes to Social Media, it might actually be a bit harder. Unlike in real life, as has been discussed a plenty, there is not an agreed upon way to measure success in Social Media. Would your mission be to get a high klout score? Are you aiming for followers?

By now, if you’ve been reading here for awhile, you know that my mission statement has nothing to do with things like that. My mission statement has 3 primary actionable items.

1. Build a community of great people whom I can turn to for learning and friendship

2. Prove to my community and their communities that I can be a resource when help is needed

3. Build relationships that may mean an addition to the relationship – a client/agency relationship off in “real life”

Each of these three points are things I can act on. That’s not to say that I can snap my fingers and each of them get done. It takes a long time to prove yourself in this world because there are SO many people who have had a head start. It’s so hard to prove you’re genuine when EVERYONE is trying to prove they’re genuine. But that’s what I’m aiming for.

What is your mission statement for Social Media?

Do not do as I have done

Now, I have to come clean with you. I did this all wrong. You see, I did not envision the end when I began. Not one jot. I’m lucky that I was directed by great people along the way who made me see that I had not followed this important step. When I started this blog, and when I started Twitter, my “mission” was, “Errr, uhh…I like to write and uhh…err, I really need to figure out this Twitter thing so that we can help our clients decide, with information, if it’s right for them.”

Great plan, right?

If you are just starting to dabble right now, take a bit of a scale-back and decide what you want to accomplish. What is the one thing that would make you delighted with Social Media? Would it be your first sale? Would it be your first friend? Would it be sticking through an entire chat? Why are those things important to you? Follow the string to the bigger things you want to accomplish. What are you here to do? Why did you launch into all of this complex stuff?

The original Social Media users may not have had to do this

I listened to a really fantastic interview over at Third Tribe that Brian Clark (@copyblogger) did with Darren Rouse (@problogger). They traced the story of how Darren went from a guy who got totally hooked on blogging because he read a neat one to becoming one of the top bloggers in the world. You would think that it all would have been scoped out, but to hear Darren tell his story, it was actually more a matter of, “Oh, well, that seems to be working, let me try this.”

When folks like Darren and Brian were getting started, there were not other Darrens or Brians around. Now, things are quite different. Not only are they around, but there are also TONS of people who picked up their example quickly. Then there are people who want to be Darren and Brian when they grow up. That is your landscape right now. That is my landscape. With so much competition, experimentation needs to be plotted. You need to have a plan. Otherwise, you will get washed away by the flood of people who, quite literally, have a mission.

A mission comes from research

While mission statements can and should come from the heart, in the world of Social Media, I believe strongly that they must also come from research, most especially if you are here as or for a company. How can your mission be to outshine your competitors if you don’t know what they’re doing? How can you increase positive discussion about your brand or your industry if you don’t know what people are saying already? Maybe it’s already positive and your efforts are diminishing that gift.

Research is another way to “chunk.” Pick keywords that will do you some good. Find out what your customers are doing. Are they even here? What are your competitors doing? What should you not do based on what they are doing?

If doing all of this research seems like it would be too time-consuming for you, click on the tab at the top right corner of this page called ClayComm2.0. A lot of what we offer is help doing research exactly like this. Whether we do it or whether you do it though, it must be done. Your mission statement must be based on a solid foundation. No room for wobbly legs in this world.

Have a plan. Do it. See the end when you begin. It sounds easy. It sounds easy for the real world. It sounds easy for Social Media. If it was really so easy, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People wouldn’t be an international best seller.

1st image by Fred Fokkelman. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Chemtec

2nd Image by Miroslav Nagy. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/vidici

I’m posting this across the various places where my Social Media community hangs out.

Do you have any recommendations? Am I providing you with content that is helpful to you? Do you want me to cover something that has been missing?

Just let me know!

I have bad news for you Neil Diamond fans. We have to go tell him that the lyrics to one of his songs are incorrect. He can’t be hooked on a feeling and have it really be meaningful. According to Stephen Covey, love is a verb. It might create a feeling, but you need to do the action first.

This is part of the wisdom that Dr. Covey offers in habit 1, which he calls “Be Proactive.” Now how does this relate to Social Media? Well, in more ways that you might perhaps think at first glance.

What can you control?

Part of the wisdom in this first segment of the book is that we are all inundated on a daily basis by forces that are beyond our control. This means that we’re always reacting. We never seem to get enough control to say, “Hey, I’m going to plan to do this first!” In Social Media, this feeling certainly can haunt you when you’re new, and then it sticks with you as you continue to dig into the Social Media reality.

For example, when I first joined Twitter, I felt like I was, say, a euglena in the Pacific Ocean. I was doing my own little photosynthesis thing, and people were talking around me, but when it came to me being proactive, it just didn’t seem to work. The same thing can happen when you start a blog. You’re sitting there working on the design, working on the content, you hit publish…then you realize that your blog is one of millions in the world. Feelings of being overwhelmed may saturate your brain.

We can use the wisdom from this first chapter to create what Dr. Covey calls a “circle of influence” for real life. In Social Media, we might use a word like your community or even less creative, we could say that you need to create a circle of friends. This wisdom is similar to a post by Jonathan Fields over at MyEscapeVelocity about Chunking. It’s about plucking some small segment out of the pie and saying, “Okay. How can I deal with this?”

Now how can you be proactive?

A lot of people talk about “promoting” in Social Media. As I was listening to Dr. Covey via my audio book, it struck me that promoting is kind of an ugly word for what goes on in Social Media. Really, it’s proactively helping someone along, isn’t it? When I put together #30Thursday posts, I don’t think of it as “promoting” people and their blogs. I think of it as shining the spotlight on certain people who write really well or who are proactive in their own right by recommending posts to be included.

Dr. Covey talks about how love is a feeling only in Hollywood. In the real world, love is the million trillion things you do to make someone feel loved. Well, in Social Media, I think the same logic could be applied to a word we toss around a lot – friend. In Twitter, if you want people to follow you, you have to be proactive in some way, don’t you? You answer a question from them that you see retweeted in your stream. You post a comment on their blog. As you do these proactive things, you add them to your circle of influence, and it becomes easier to continue to concentrate on them. It becomes easier to make them feel “loved.”  Your universe becomes smaller because you are concentrating on key people, and you are concentrating on making them feel the Social Media love.

One little sticking point

There’s one root that’s sticking up out of the ground and kind of tripping me up, and it’s where Social Media begins to look really far separated from “the real world.” In your every day life, you can shrink your circle of influence down to a point where you can manage it, right? “I care about my family, my job, and my church,” you might say. Those three sectors of your life become your focus, and you proactively work to gain control of those sectors. You build those relationships through proactive relationship building.

Well, in Social Media, you can do this to some extent, but what I am learning is that the more you try to identify people whom you want in your community, the more people start becoming visible to you, because everything in Twitter is about six degrees of separation. If I follow back one person, there is the chance for all of THEIR followers to find me, and I can also find them. The more people in your community, the more people you meet. It’s hard to maintain a proactive stance to that sort of thing. You can’t say, “Oh, I can’t control this anymore, so I’m not going to friend anyone anymore.” I mean, I guess you could, but then what’s really the point?

Right now, I am still able to disperse my proactive care (I hope) across a lot of different people in my community, but I know, because people at this point have told me, that there will come a time when you just can’t respond to everybody. You can’t read every person’s blog every week.

Is there a way to gain control over your Social Media reality so that you can be proactive? It’s just got to remain about “chunking.” As your community gets bigger, you divide it into smaller lists, right? Concentrate on a list a week, perhaps. But knowing that you have the goal of being proactive with your community – that’s what leads to everything else.

That’s what went through my mind as I listened to Dr. Covey talk about the 1st habit of highly effective people. Do you feel like it’s possible to carve out a controllable niche in Social Media? Do you feel like Social Media is more reactive than proactive?

1st Image by Abdulaziz Almansour. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/code1name

Several years ago, my dad purchased a book for me called The 7 Habits of Effective People, by Stephen Covey. Being a 20-something, I assumed that the gift implied that I wasn’t successful. Ah, the people who think twenty-somethings are more mature than teenagers 🙂

I held on to the book, but I didn’t really give it a chance. After the rise to popularity that people like Dr. Phil experienced, I felt increasingly over the years that I didn’t need another book that would, as I like to say, be “grab you by the collar” stuff. In my own experience, the only way to really get yourself to move is to motivate yourself. Guidance is important, but until you are ready to internalize it, people could talk to you till they’re blue in the face and it wouldn’t move you an inch. What would this book do that would be so revolutionary?

Earlier this year, I read Trust Agents, and there are several references throughout the book to this same 7 Habits. As I started delving into the world of Social Media, I noticed that everyone I respect seems to be at least familiar with the book, if not steeped in it. So, finally convinced by 7 Habits believer Chris Brogan, I bought an audio version of the book. I’m already done with it. And I wish that I wasn’t.

Instead of doing a “book review” of why I think this particular book, whether in print or audible, is really important, I am going to create a 7-part series that expresses what I gleaned from this book, which is a much deeper understanding of how Social Media can work for people. Now, this is kind of funny. When Stephen Covey first was working on the study that grew into his best selling book, it was the 1970s. The internet was just a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye. Steve Jobs maybe only owned 2 black turtlenecks. In the audio version, Covey refers to “the email.” So how can I say that this book helped me understand Social Media better?

It’s all about the principles.

You see, what lies at the heart of The 7 Habits is your heart. Your relationships with people. How to relate to people better. Now of course, all of these lessons can be used in “real life” too, but what struck me is how Social Media can kind of strip out these particular principles and really shine the spotlight on them. In Social Media, you are not distracted necessarily by white noise, facial expressions, rolled eyes, a long history, fatigue, or other things. Your brain and your heart are using your keyboard, connecting with other people who can only present themselves to you as their brain and heart lets them.

It’s social interaction 101. It’s a blank chalkboard (er, do people still use chalkboards?) that one can write these 7 principles on and say, “Oh, wow, there it is.”

In thinking about Social Media through the filter of these 7 habits, I came to see a lot of what goes on behind the scenes for some of the most “effective” people I see on Social Media sites. I come to see where I need to grow as a person who uses this medium. It’s also a nice way to remember that Social Media really does mean that you are dealing with other people. You are not socializing with your computer or your phone or your…whatever it is you are using right now. Maybe your television! You are socializing with other people who are, perhaps, more like you than you realize.

More Pragmatism about Ethics

Before Covey even delves into the 7 habits he talks about how he has never seen so much pragmatism about being ethical. In other words, people are not doing ethical things because they are ethical. They may be doing things because that’s what celebrities have to do, or that’s how you get more followers on Twitter. It was upon hearing this that I knew that I would be absorbing this wisdom with Social Media in mind. Because being ethical does have its benefits in this world, doesn’t it? I like to give back because that’s the way I’m wired, but it would be easy enough for someone to say, “Oh, okay, I’ll promote 12 people for every tweet I do because that will get me more followers.”

So I’d love to hear your thoughts about that tiny nugget first. Is Social Media making people TOO pragmatic about being ethical? Are people being nice so that they can get ahead? And how can you tell?

I hope you enjoy this series. I hope that I can impart my sentiments to you as I felt them as I went through the book, because it was extremely interesting. It would be awesome to have you add to the conversation as I go – if you’ve already read the book, or if you are reading it now.

You know how sometimes you learn a new word and then all of a sudden it seems to show up everywhere? You wonder why a billboard for hot dogs has this word that you just learned, for example. And you know how the same kind of thing happens when you’re wrestling with an issue? How it seems to literally haunt you?

That’s me and affiliate marketing

This all started, I don’t know, about a month ago, I guess. Chris Brogan posted about how he approaches affiliate marketing, and I commented, “Well that’s all fine and dandy, but affiliate marketing…I don’t know. It rubs me the wrong way.” I may or may not have been chided for being an agency woman who struggles with product placement.

Ever since that conversation, I have been wrestling with the whole affiliate marketing thing, and that debate, ever since, has seemed to pop up everywhere. Matt Shaw talked about the advertising on Chris’s site (among others). In Third Tribe, there is tons of information on how to do it. There are conferences for it. Everyone I talk to says it’s absolutely worth it.

Still I struggle.

I found the nut

I finally realized the problem, and I thought perhaps you are experiecing or will experience similar debates, so I thought I would talk it out.

So…I’ve been blogging professionally for about 7 months now.  Not even a year. I am getting a lot of support. In terms of traffic, it is building, but it is certainly not huge. I have carefully framed this blog as a place where (hopefully) people feel they can be directed to helpful information, discuss things that are going on in the marketing world, and share with me their own insights on same. That’s really what my main goal was setting out. Mission accomplished, but I still feel I am building. I am still so new that I don’t even know the ways that I need to improve yet.

I think that affiliate marketing works for people who have established long-time credibility with their blog community. Everyone knows that the stuff being recommended is being recommended for the community, and the blogger just happens to get a bit of money if you click that link and buy from there. I don’t know if I’ve established enough credibility with you, my readers, to go down that road. I don’t know if I have offered enough content to merit peppering in affiliate links now and then.

So I thought I would ask.

If you are reading this, maybe you are someone who has been reading my blog for a few months now. Maybe you know me from Twitter a little. Would you be put off if I became an affiliate marketer? Obviously, it would not be an every post kind of thing, and I wouldn’t shove it down your throat. I think you know that about me.

Maybe the more broad question is what do you think about affiliate marketing in general? It’s difficult for me to believe that I have thought of something that Brian Clark, Darren Rouse, Chris Brogan, Sonia Simone, and countless others missed when they grew with the assistance of affiliate marketing. I don’t think folks like that would direct people how to do affiliate marketing and then snicker and say, “Heh, they’re evil now.” I mean, right?

Help me roll around this little nut in my brain. I am open to any and all perspectives (and am hoping for them).

Image by Richard Dudley. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bluegum

One of the posts that I highlighted this week in the #30Thursday round-up was a post by Beth Harte about how marketing people and PR people are still trying to “push” using Social Media. Then, today, Chris Brogan referred to how John E. Kennedy and Albert Lasker combined to create the idea of advertising as “salesmanship in print.” Sometimes, ideas collide and create something new.

A little review

First, a brief reminder about some Social Media best practices. Do not use “sell” language. Do not auto-DM sales opportunities. Do not tweet out news releases. Do not blog your selly e-newsletter stories. This is what Beth Harte’s blog post is all about. Social Media is supposed to be about engagement. People don’t want to be sold to anymore. Rather, they want to know why getting that product or service from you is better than getting the same thing from someone else. Your job, as their friend, is to steer them the right way. Sometimes that means you might steer them away from making you money. If push marketing had a polar opposite from Mars, say, this would be it.

“Peoples is peoples”

Even as a thirty-something, one of my favorite movies remains Muppets Take Manhattan. I can’t help it. It’s the muppets, it reminds me of my childhood, AND it has references to marketing. What more could you want, really? Anyway, one of the lines that is repeated a couple of times in the movie is “Peoples is peoples.” That’s what I’m really going to be talking about here in this post. Let me explain what I mean.

We say that you should not push your products or services out when you are using Social Media. You should engage with people, inform, create relationships, and make them literally desperate to form a professional relationship with you. So what a lot of companies are doing right now is concentrating on that, and then they are turning around and placing an ad in a trade publication that has starbursts, big neon pink “buy now” copy, and some cheesy image meant to attract the eye (these are not ads that we have done, just for the record).

This is where I get kind of confused. You approach Social Media knowing that in order to attract customers, especially high quality customers, you need to keep the sales message soft. You want to reach the same demographics, only you’re more targeted, in an industry publication. And so now, those same people are going to be flipping through the magazine saying, “Gosh, I really want to be smacked across the face with a hard sales message!”

I think not.

Peoples is peoples.

Advertising is dead. Long live advertising.

I do not think that all of this means the end of advertising as an entity. I just think it signals how advertising could evolve, meet the era in which we live (despite the strong nostalgic pull of Mad Men), and make a huge comeback.

Yep. I said it. I think that advertising could become massively effective for companies, but you have to play the game the right way.

OK, I can tell that you’re feeling a little faint. Let me back up a bit.

When you are writing a blog, like this one here, you really have no idea who is reading it. Sure, people are subscribing. Some are commenting. You can see who is tweeting it out. But more than likely, that is only telling part of the story. There is also no guarantee that the people involved in all of those actions are the people you want to target as your key audience.

“Gosh,” you might be thinking to yourself. “I wish there was a way to still reach my key customers and prospects while having some qualification to know that I’m in the right place.”

That, my friends, is called advertising.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If you are just placing space in a sort of willy nilly fashion, this idea will not work. You need to have someone that is willing to study BPA audits of publication circulation, compare those numbers with other publications who claim to do the same thing, and make recommendations about what the best place for you would be. Our agency happens to have over 50 years of experience in doing just that sort of thing in case you want to learn more.

Let’s say, though, that you place your ad in a publication that you know is reaching exactly who you want to reach. The next key is to treat them exactly the way you would online. Do not use your ad space to smack people with a sales call when they are looking for knowledge. This is not difficult. You KNOW these people. You customize your products or services to keep THESE people happy and willing to do business with you. You hear from them wherever you go. You know what their struggles are. You know why you can help them.

If you or your company blogs, and if you follow Social Media best practices, you probably spend a lot of time talking about your industry. You talk about problems that might be haunting your customers. They know, because you are transparent, that there is always a soft sell sneaking around in the corner, but they also know that you are offering really valuable information.

Why can’t we do that in ads? Of course you can still have a call to action. Of course people are going to understand on a cerebral level that they are looking at an ad. But why not make it worth their while? Why not make it feel like you are talking directly to them? Why not invite people to your blog OR your website? Why not have a call to action that invites people to carry the conversation further with you on Twitter?

Advertising doesn’t have to die. There’s a cure. It’s called a life-change. It’s called reinvigorating the concept. And it’s all based around the simple concept that your customers are people, no matter how you are trying to reach them. Peoples is peoples.

1st image by Jakub Krechowicz. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/sqback

2nd Image by Stephen Davies. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/steved_np3