Marketing Talk

As illustrated via tales from my life.

Assume that people are saying nice things about you, so don’t get involved

When I was in high school, the “droop” look came into fashion amongst the males. In case you don’t recall various fashion trends from the mid-90s, the “droop” (which can still be seen today) is what you call the look where the guy is wearing his pants down at about mid-tush level. Now, being a person of small stature, I was often at a good height to, unfortunately, closely examine this fashion trend. One day, I was waiting for my hot pocket in the lunch line, minding my own business, just looking straight ahead. All of a sudden, the guy who was in front of me looked behind him, looked at me, kind of smiled as if to say, “I know that my tush looks fantastic right now,” and then he turned around to face forward again. Factually, I was not starting at his butt, at least not in an admiring kind of way, but that fellow would never know. He didn’t pursue the conversation.

Similar misunderstandings can occur if you don’t get involved in Social Media. You can assume that people are saying nice things about you when in fact they might not be saying anything about you at all. Is that a risk you can take?

Overvalue what you do

As my brother was scouring yard sales, getting ready to move into his first apartment, he and my mom came upon a shocking sight. Many, many years ago, our agency had given out coffee cups as one of our client appreciation gifts. Lo and behold, right there on the table, was one of those cups, on sale for 25 cents! We couldn’t figure out who the family was that was having the sale – they certainly had not been our clients. That made it worse. The original recipient had cast our poor cup off and now it was being given away, practically.

In Social Media, you can think that everything you are doing is the most amazing super duper thing ever, but if your audience doesn’t dig it, it will be cast aside. Are you monitoring what they think?

Misjudging your customers

A couple of years ago, I went out to lunch with my mom and dad. It was a work day. We had had a meeting so I was dressed in my business finest – pin stripes and all. As we were waiting to be seated, the hostess handed me a kid’s menu.Again, I repeat. It was a work day. Pin Stripes. I didn’t say anything because frankly, what can you say when someone does something so silly? But I will never forget the ludicrous nature of that error in judgment, which was simply the result of not thinking carefully. Are you similarly misjudging your customers, your leads, your audience, or your co-workers? The results can be devastating and long-lasting. Give it some thought. Careful thought.

Assume your authority is and will always be recognized

I had a teacher once who, on the first day of class, asked a student to read the class a book that had comforted the teacher when a family member was in the hospital. The book was the kind of alleged feel good book that makes you want to tear your face off. A tree was losing leaves, all of which were personified, of course. Finally it got down 2 leaves, and which one should go first, and what the journey to the ground meant. I mean, Robert Smith of The Cure would not read this book to kids. Sadly, the teacher was no longer apparently very taken with the story. Her long day of telling us about her pets and having us fill out personality cards had worn her out. She fell fast asleep. That was just the first day of school.

Are you like my silly teacher? Do you assume that everyone knows you are the leader in the industry, and therefore you get a bit careless with how you act in Social Media networks and beyond? There are tons of people encountering you every day who have no idea who you are or what your gig is. They don’t know your company or your products. They are meeting you for the first time. Do you want your first impression to be “wow, that person is CRAZY?!?” Think about how you present yourself. Authority is as authority does.

Buy into the numbers game

A friend of our family told me a year ago or so about a conversation she had with me when I was about 6. “What’s your favorite food, Margie?” I responded, “Fetuccini Alfredo.” “What’s your favorite movie, Margie?” “Oh, Amadeus.” Clearly, these answers were not particularly in the “I expected that” category. But age is just a number, a marker, and it’s not the only one. Similarly, one should not judge a Social Media campaign by the numbers. Is a Facebook fan page highly successful if it has a lot of fans? Not necessarily. Are you getting all you can out of Twitter because you have 20,000 followers? Maybe not. Ask questions. Engage. You might be surprised at what you find out.

Hope this helps.

Okay, so, maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the Friday after a very condensed work week and I’ve just finally gone bonkers. But so help me, if I see one more note about how “xyz” in the marketing world is dying, I might have to become a big green giant monster. There are going to be challenges involved in that endeavor, I’m not going to lie. But it feels like almost anything would be preferable to hearing how something is dead or how something is killing something else.

The History of Death

Now there’s a subhead that screams TGIF, right?

Here’s the thing. A few times throughout the history of the world, saying that something was dead, or saying that something was going to kill something else, was entirely, 100% true and spot on. It’s said that many dinosaurs were blogging about volatile weather and environmental conditions before they all became oil for our cars. Native Americans were pretty spot on about how the neverending tide of strangers would affect them. Train guys were right that the Model T would probably not help the train business. Maybe there was even a bit of truth to the song “Video killed the radio star.”

I’ll give you all of that.

Sometimes, I’ll even concede, living beings pass away, and you can trace the causes.

I’m entirely reasonable. I will agree with you on all of that. Now, let me say something else.

Print is not dying. Advertising is not dying. They are changing. Could they die if we flail about and say OH MY GOODNESS THEY ARE GONNA DIE! Yep. But otherwise, we’re in okay shape.

Print is not dying

What do we mean when we say “Print” anyway? Are we talking about newspapers? Magazines? Ads in magazines? Books? I’ve always wondered how such a simple word, covering so many iterations, could be consigned to death.

My good friend Stan (aka @pushingsocial) had a great quote during one of our shared Twitter chats. He said that if print is dying (and I paraphrase) it is probably because what you are putting into print is very very stinky. I liked that a lot. So did a lot of other people. Stan is the king of chat RTs.

So given that, why are people saying that print is dead? Let me ask YOU some questions.

If there hadn’t been so many stories about how the New York Times had plagiarized and falsified stories, do you think it would still be in this much trouble?

If people were taught at a young age to enjoy creating, reading, and sharing good content beyond the realm of the X-box, do you think we would consider books to be in such trouble? And by the way, if people aren’t buying books, why are they going to get a Kindle so that they can buy lots of books? I am hazy on that. Please help.

If print ads were creative, informative, less selly, and had clear calls to action, would we say that print ads were dying/ill/dead/wimpy?

Print is changing. Direct mail is changing. Print advertisements are changing. Change can mean dying, but that’s an awfully negative way to look at things. When your kid graduates and goes off to college, do you get condolence cards lamenting the passing of said kid’s youth? I sure hope not. Change can be exciting. It can be rife with opportunity. We can use print in new and exciting ways. We can be innovative. But no. We are all plugging for a place on Six Feet Under – the sequel (marketing style).

Advertising is not dead either

Okay, I’ll grant you, I have some personal stock invested in this fact. If advertising has died already, then I have created an extremely intricate hallucinatory world for myself, minus things like a personal masseuse or a hulky husband.

What is advertising? I think we need to look at this work and break it down. Essentially, advertising is really promoting, right? Like, if someone at a really nice restaurant yells out something extremely personal about themselves, we might say something like, “geeze, advertise it why doncha?”  In point of fact, humans have been advertising for centuries. It was promoters who drove people to go West on the Oregon Trail, after all. “Oh yes, you will love the oxen getting stuck in the mud, the Winters that will force you to eat each other, and the occasional Native American or random person who will shoot at you.” Well, they didn’t exactly say that. They painted a picture powerful enough to get people to endure all of that other stuff. What was the trade network in ancient times other than a Social Media network? “Here, you give me those really nice seashells and in return I can give you this pottery for the low low price of 18 blankets!”

Advertising as executed by an agency or a firm (I like using the word firm) has undergone numerous changes just during my ridiculously short lifetime. When I was a kid, I’d visit my dad’s office and, sadly, “play” office. The huge set of markers back where the designers wee always fascinated me. Now, of course, there are computers and programs like Illustrator. Major revolutionary change. Now, “advertising” has been consigned to just print and online ads, but a) those aren’t dead and b) advertising is evolving into a word-of-mouth, person-to-person kind of thing rather than a mass communication tool. Again, only for the very sour does change automatically equate to death.

So please, before you post another blog, another tweet, another article, another Facebook status about how books music advertising direct mail trade shows newspapers myspace facebook twitter and all of us are gonna die…take a chill pill, think how you can view the massive changes in our world in a more positive fashion, and then let me know where you end up.

1st Image by Harrison Keely. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/harrykeely

2nd Image  by Crystal Woroniuk. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/cdw0107

My second #30Thursday post, and there were many more responses this time! To answer a few questions: I will take the first 30 posts I receive as long as they are not vulgar and are well-written. Business-related is nice but if we stray a bit, that’s okay. Feel free to take this concept and run with it. The idea is to promote each other, read each other, and learn more. And now, 30 posts of this last week that made it to the list!

1. @kseniacoffman takes you on a tour of Chicago – via surveillance landmarkers!

2. @salamicat does a great post about Social Media and human relationships

3.  @DWesterberg wrote a fantastic post on the B2B “panic call” and what to do about it. Great advice.

4. Are you a young communicator or new to Twitter? Here is some great advice from @AdamSuffolkU

Yesterday, as many people know, Google launched Google Instant. You can see a great synopsis of the new product through Suzanne Vara’s post on Google Instant.  In the Reader’s Digest form…you know how you used to type a search into the Google search bar and words would come up that Google thought you might be looking for? Well now, instead of just words, Google sends you to what it thinks will be a relevant search results page as you type.

As a researcher at heart, I’m not a fan. I think that it’s risky to take people directly to results because the quality of the research, I believe, will disintegrate. “Well, this isn’t exactly what I wanted, but it showed up in the first position as soon as I started typing, so maybe I’ll just uses that.” But that’s not really my main concern today. My main concern, as a person in marketing, is what just happened to SEO.

Be on the first page?

For many years, SEO experts have been telling companies that the results on the first page are what really matter. It still may to some extent, but in conducting a few searches based on keywords relevant to our clients, I’m noticing a few things.

1. When you type in a search, there are five positions open below the search bar. If there are 3 sponsored ads, that’s too bad. Only 2 organic results show up without scrolling.This only alters if you click on one of the words that shows up while you are typing. Then you are taken to a slightly longer results page for that specific phrase.

2. Image search results sometimes are showing up as result #5, sometimes higher. If you don’t have a lot of images out there, you might be in big trouble.

3. The same thing holds true for videos.

4. Preference seems to be weighted towards keywords that show up in the website’s URL. Typing in the word “first” pulls up First Merit Bank and First Energy for me. A search for a product name that used to pull up several distributor sites now pulls up the manufacturer’s site in the first 2 positions.

Pay-Per-Click

If I was engaged in a PPC campaign right now I’d also be a little concerned, by the way. We all have seen the eye tests that show that people read web pages from the upper left corner, with the hottest area being in the middle, and then the cooler areas off to the right, where PPC ads have always been located. Well, if the organic search results didn’t distract you before, try concentrating on if there even are any ads on the right while the results are changing as you type in the middle of the page. The sponsored links above the organic results are the next best place to be now.

What does this mean?

How will this alter SEO strategy? You now need to show up in the first five positions to grab someone’s attention. Does this mean that you really push in the few very specific keywords that are most important to you? Does this mean that you start grabbing every relevant word possible in case your competitors aren’t there? Maybe it means that SEO is just about getting your company and product name out there so that people search for it specifically.

What do you think the ramifications will be? I’m learning right along with you.

Image by Svilen Milev. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/svilen001

A few weeks ago, people started posting all over the place asking for votes so that they could be part of the SXSW panel. I was kind of baffled by the whole process, but what really struck me at the time is that a lot of people who often reference each other, send traffic to each other, and exchange friendly greetings on Twitter were essentially competing against each other for votes.

That little nugget of a thought has been rolling around between my ears ever since, kind of bugging me. It really started to gnaw at me yesterday after I put some of my thoughts into my post about questions. And then I figured out why.

In some way or other, most of the people I follow, most of the people who follow me, and most of the people whom I see on Twitter are, in some way, competitors. Maybe not directly, maybe not even intensely. But we are competing for the same kinds of attention, the same kinds of business.

Ooh, did it just get warm in here?

I understand that this is an uncomfortable topic. You don’t really see a whole lot about it, but it’s always the 80 pound gorilla or the pink elephant in the room. It is a fact, though. If you call yourself a business consultant, you are competing for business with other business consultants. If you are a “Social Media expert,” you are competing, in essence, with everyone else who is called or who calls themselves Social Media experts. I am competing with other advertising agency people, especially those in the B2B business. Now you might say, “Well, geography separates us and is part of our niche” but what do we know about Social Media? This information, for everyone, goes everywhere.

A hint of confusion, a pinch of don’t go there

I think about this little kernel of a fact, and then I think about the frustration that a lot of people have expressed (experts or not) about being asked to give away information. And I’m kind of wondering…is this a frustration…is this so ambiguous…because we don’t consciously act on Social Media sites as if we’re cavorting with the enemy?

Let’s say, for example, that I write a post about how I recommend planning a marketing campaign. If you are a chicken farmer, I’m not really too worried about sharing this information. However, if you’re another agency person, or if you’re a marketing consultant, you could very easily utilize my concept, perhaps without even realizing you were doing so. I would never know. And since I’m writing this information on a wide open blog, there’s really nothing stopping you or helping me in that scenario, right?

Now in the real world, if another agency person came up to me and said, “Hey, I’d like advice on how you recommend planning a marketing campaign,” what would I say? What would you say? Maybe that’s the difference, in part, between the very giving nature of people online and then the frustration that happens as a result of phone calls. When you get a phone call at work, the curtain has been raised, the gig is up, and the wizard is visible. Someone is asking you for your professional opinion and they’re asking you to give it for free, which is what you spend all of your time doing when you’re not taking calls and doing other parts of your job.

The Facade of Social Media

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of days. I know it sounds negative but it really isn’t – it’s just an inconvenient truth, as Al Gore might say.

Over the weekend, @salamicat wrote a fantastic post about the sort of anonymity that Social Media gives you. If you have bad skin, if you don’t feel like dressing up, if you’re having a bad hair day, none of it matters. You can communicate with people and just enjoy their content.

Well, this is great for personal life, but it may not be something we can continue forever on the business side of things. If you’re a real estate agent, you can follow all of the other agents in your territory, but ultimately, the time may come when you are both competing to sell more, or maybe to sell the same home. If you’re an author, you may follow lots of authors, but when a speaking opportunity comes, you might need to compete against them.

I’d love to think that we could maintain our feet squarely under us in both worlds – that we could be open, sharing, generous, and unbiased online and also approach competition gracefully and in a friendly fashion. Is that possible though? As the world economy shifts, as the numbers of jobless increase, can we carry our online selves into the real world when we are in a competitive situation?

Are we clouding our true reality?

What do you think?

Image by Mo Dollahon. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/furylife

Last night, @LoriRuff (aka the LinkedIn Diva) posted a link to an article titled “Is LinkedIn checking out?” Given that she is the LinkedIn Diva, I thought that this must be a pretty interesting article, so I took a look. The article makes some good points about what LinkedIn may be lacking. Some of its features may be outdated, too. But for all of that, the article gave me a different idea about LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is smaller than Facebook and Twitter…because there are less features to manage, why not use LinkedIn as Social Media training wheels? Ease your way in to Social Media, dip your toe in, knowing that things could get more crazy, more of a balance act, just like the difference between training wheels and a regular bicycle. Here are some ways LinkedIn could be helpful.

1. You control your network: Unlike in Twitter, where people can follow and unfollow you 5 times an hour if they want, LinkedIn is much more restrained. To follow someone you need to show that you know them or encountered them in real life somewhere along the line. They need to approve. You get easy emails when someone wants to join your network, and you can approve or ignore or disallow each one. Emails within LinkedIn help you keep track along with an alphabetical listing of your contacts.

2. Status Updates aren’t all that important: Because LinkedIn was developed from the start as a professional network, it’s never been lumped in with the “I don’t need to know what someone ate for dinner” crowd of Social Media sites. This means that there’s less pressure on you to post updates, but it also means you can practice commenting on the status updates you do see so that you can get used to interacting that way online.

3. You choose your scale of involvement: There is little pressure in LinkedIn to join groups. It’s helpful for networking, of course, but you  have full control over what groups you want to join. You can determine how you want to be contacted about updates to the group – daily digest emails are good because you can scan everything that happened in one quick email. If you feel like participating in a group, that’s fine, but you still get the information being shared even if you don’t post much. This is different from Facebook pages and groups, where you have to take the initiative to go to the page or group and find out what’s going on. It’s harder to feel involved in that scenario, and it’s harder to stay caught up.

4. The closed wall: LinkedIn is much more locked down than Facebook or Twitter. You can control your privacy in all three sites, but much more information can be safely locked away in LinkedIn. If one of the obstacles in the way of you getting involved in Social Media is the “privacy thing,” this is a good place to start.

5. Conversations: One thing you learn about Facebook and Twitter is that they really are most fun when you converse and engage. This can seem tricky because there are so many conversations going on on both sites all of the time. On LinkedIn, you are networking with people in your own industry, and you can join groups that discuss your interests and passions. This allows you to learn how to converse on a social networking site in a low-pressure, reasonably chaos-free environment.

Using LinkedIn still requires planning, especially if you are entering the site on a corporate rather than an individual basis. There are ways to make clear that several individuals all work for the same company, for example. And LinkedIn has features that extend beyond the beginner stage. You can now add video, for example. However, in terms of dipping your toe into what Social Media can do for you and/or your company, LinkedIn is a great place to start.

Does this make sense? Let me know below. And if you need help getting started, we can help you with that, too.

Image by Joachim Bär. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/joejoe77