Marketing Talk

Well hello there, trusty readers! Sorry for the lag in posting. Truthfully, I have been on vacation! Had a lovely time in Cape Cod & Boston. I know, I know. I should have let you all know, but true to my word, I don’t believe in broadcasting to the world that I’m leaving my home abandoned. WHAT is wrong with me!?! 🙂 Anyway, due to various factors such as the stress of travel and lack of sleep caused by watching the Boston fireworks extravaganza Sunday night, I was not able to stay awake for my favorite Twitter chat, Blog chat. It looks like I missed quite a doozie!

To get caught up, I read this excellent post by Ian M. Rountree. The main topic of the chat, and hence of Ian’s post, is “voice” in blogging. But it seems like what happened is that a conversation about what Blogging is at heart blossomed. Is a blog something that should be written anonymously? If you have multiple people from your company blogging, should you broadcast that? Is Blogging writing? Is writing Blogging?

All of these questions are both important and thought-provoking. They inspired me to ask myself what I think Blogging is, or what I set out to do with my Blog(sssss). After some heavy mental lifting, here’s where I am on the whole thing.

Blogging is a series of conversations aimed at one central goal

If you think about the Three Musketeers, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For me, it’s “One for all, all for one.” And oddly enough, that’s what I think of when I think about a Blog. The “all” can be you and your readers, it can be you and your co-bloggers, or a combination. But the central core of the issue is that you are all generally interested in the same types of things, the same types of goals, and you want to share your opinions and anything you might have learned. That’s a recipe for a conversation, right?

So while I was sleeping soundly (and I do mean soundly), folks on Twitter were debating how to approach a multi-person or team blog. Based on my perception of a Blog as a conversation, I would say the following:

1. Be transparent. Let people see different perspectives, different voices, and let them attribute those characteristics appropriately.

2. Before you put virtual pen to digital paper, have a plan. What is the “one” that you are all for? No matter who is writing and no matter what each individual’s particular spin may be, a person visiting the Blog should not be confused at any point about what the conversation is about.

3. To show that there is an underlying sense of teamwork and cohesiveness, be interactive with your team members. Comment on each others’ blogs, comment on comments for a post you haven’t written, etc.

4. Don’t try to out-do each other. Blogging is not about ego, I don’t care who says otherwise! If one of your team members seems to get more comments than you, don’t worry about it. Maybe people respond more to their posts but read your posts and think more deeply about them.

5. Make sure you make accessible a link where your individual voices really do become one. This could be a link to your website or even a link to a Facebook page. Conversations are great, but they might distract someone who is just looking for straightforward information.

A quick PS

I do NOT think that a multi-voice Twitter account is a good idea. On Twitter you have so little room to make big connections with people that leaving doubt as to who is talking can be deadly. I recommend the way Dell does it, for example – include some corporate prefix or suffix (or name) in your handle, then personalize so everyone has a separate but related account.

There is a scene in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that describes the various flaws the different races of Middle Earth exhibit. Of the Dwarves, it is said that they delved too greedily and too deep. The Dwarves were miners, you see. They were good miners. They found riches galore, but it was never enough. Eventually, the Dwarves dug so deeply that they released horrible demons.

I’ve been thinking about this description a lot as I follow the tale of the BP oil spill. We dug too greedily and too deep. We didn’t exactly release a Balgrog, but it’s mighty close.

As a marketer, it is possible to dig too greedily and too deep, especially on the heels of a major project like a white paper or a webinar. An incident that happened to me last week illustrates this point.

Last week I received an e-mail from a source I trust indicating that there was a new white paper available. The white paper had been authored by a guest company, but since it came recommended by the source I knew, and since the title fascinated me anyway, I decided to take a look and I ended up downloading the document. After reading the document, I showed it to my boss and I also tweeted about it. Happy ending, right?

Wrong.

Every day since I downloaded this white paper, I have received an e-mail from the author of the document. The emails are bluntly “sell” oriented. They want me to sign up for a training that will expand upon the white paper I downloaded.

As a consumer, these emails seem well over the top to me. Getting an “open” AND a click on an e-blast is a win to begin with. For someone to download a paper and give you their personal info is even better.

As a marketer, I still feel that an email per day is overkill. By a long shot. Had the marketer handled the situation differently, I might well be blogging about their effectiveness right now instead of the point where they made me want to claw my computer’s eyes out.

What to do

Okay, I know what you are thinking. As a marketer, I should have known that submitting my e-mail address was an opt-in. Well, I get that. But you have to be really REALLY careful when offering information-rich content like white papers. A lot of people who are inspired to download white papers are in a learning mode or a research mode, not a buying mode. How shocked would you be if a salesman jumped out of a book you’re reading? Same kind of feel.

The conversion from content to conversion is a rough one, admittedly, but here’s an idea that might have prevented me from wanting to put a hex on this person’s email account.

1. Acknowledge that you appreciate the steps it took for someone to download your white paper. Whether they clicked from an eblast or from the web, they not only had to click, they had to fill out a form, then hit download, then wait for the massive document to load. That’s valuable time. Send out an email thanking the person for spending that time. Make yourself available via email and Social Media to answer any questions.

2. Give people 3 days to read the white paper in peace. Assume that they spent their free time downloading the thing. Assume they are hanging on your every word. Don’t drive them crazy.

3. After 3 days, send out a brief survey. IF you are trying to sell something, mention it briefly in your introduction. Ask if the person has passed on the article to a co-worker or boss. Ask if they have shared it via Social Media. Answers to these questions will establish a relationship (potentially) and inform you as to whether you have a budding “brand evangelizer” on your hand.

People responding is the gold

Never forget that someone clicking to and downloading your content is a major gift. It’s the gift of time. It’s the gift of interest. If your content is good, that person will look for more from you. They’ll promote you. They’ll quote you in blog posts. They’ll look for you on Twitter. And eventually, if you decide to publish a book or host a paid webinar, that person will likely not only pay themselves but they’ll also recommend that other people do so.

This person’s content was extremely good, but I am not likely to promote them by name because I don’t want other people to get bombarded with sell emails. If I really wanted to be ruthless, I could name the person and say, “Hey, don’t download this person’s stuff.” That would be an epic problem.

Don’t delve too greedily. Don’t delve too deep. If you are just in it for the money, content is probably not your game. If you are in it to help educate people, you probably won’t rake in the cash right away. Build your brand. Build your credibility. Build your network of supporters. Be patient. Don’t release the demons.

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/QR9iudjz0

I was going through some Facebook messages last night and thinking about how a lot of my friends have 400 friends or more. I have about 150 friends. They are primarily people I have met and/or liked in real life, or ya know, family. I take as much time as the day allows to get caught up on everyone’s news. I comment, I interact. And I really enjoy it.

On Twitter, I like reading posts a lot more than I like making them. It’s hard to get conversations started on Twitter if you initiate them unless you’ve already got a lot of pull. This is because people are highly driven to gather their own followers. When we’re on Twitter, we post hoping that someone will respond or even better, retweet. We’re not really looking to engage. When you read, you’re the one who is replying or engaging.

This led me to yet another thought. If you are focused primarily on attracting followers or friends on Social Media networks, and you’re not really conversing with anyone, are you really engaging in Social Media? Methinks not.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy sharing my ideas. Boy do I. Anyone who has about 17 blogs going in various states of completeness clearly has too much to say! And when you post something that sparks a conversation, it’s extremely rewarding. However, I encounter more people than I would have guessed who just post post post. People respond. People ask questions. People try to lure this person out of their “I post therefore I am” mentality. But it just doesn’t work. What is the point of this?

I’m curious to know how you (yes YOU) approach Social Media from a business and/or a personal perspective. What do you look at first? If I have limited time, I look at the replies section to make sure I can respond to anyone that may be talking to me. Other people might check their number of followers, while others might go straight to the retweet section. Where do you go first on Facebook? Homepage to see updates or friend requests page to add followers? Why do you go where you go?

Let’s talk. Your turn 🙂

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

Time is of the essence these days. Everyone is busy. Time is an endangered species, it seems. We all want the most mileage out of cars, out of our jobs, out of our networks, and out of everything else we do, too.

I maintain that one of the biggest time savers is, paradoxically, a lot of planning on the front end. To illustrate this point, imagine this hypothetical situation (or maybe it’ll hit close to home). You’re the CEO of a manufacturing company, and you’ve just introduced a new and exciting benefit-oriented product. You write up a description of the product, how it works, and how it will benefit your prospects and customers. Still, the roll-out process seems undeniably daunting. How can you get the most bang for your creative buck?

With a lot of planning on the front end, that little paragraph can form the entire backbone of a campaign. With some additions here, some revisions there, and some rewording when needed, an entire product launch can be built around that first little cloud of a product thought. Here are 30 ways to use a single paragraph of copy to promote a new product across a multitude of channels. Just imagine where 2 paragraphs could take you!

1. Blurb of copy introducing the product on the company homepage
2. Press Release
3. Copy for a sell sheet
4. Copy for a YouTube “about” description
5. Break it up into a handful of Tweets
6. Facebook Status Update
7. Facebook Note
8. E-Blast
9. Ad copy
10. Copy for a landing page to track ad performance
11. Blog
12. Description for a Flickr ” post
13. Answer to a LinkedIn question in the Q&A section
14. Answer to a question that pops up in a LinkedIn group
15. Copy for Booth Graphics
16. Copy for a direct mail piece
17. Webinar Abstract
18. Answer to a customer email
19. Pull a line of copy for a promo/promotional item
20. Blurb for “on hold” customer to listen to
21. Submission for a value-added write-up (could be on product, lit, other)
22. Introduction to a case study
23. Centerpiece of an article
24. Slide for a presentation at a company open house
25. Presentation to a board of directors
26. Narration for a video on the product
27. Core narration for a podcast
28. Submission for innovative manufacturer award
29. Baseline for interview
30. Description for an industry buyers guide or directory

Image by Chris Gilbert.http://www.sxc.hu/profile/iotdfi

I decided to do some exploration tonight of some Social Media sites that I am not as familiar with as I should be — sites like tumblr, for example. An interesting thing about tumblr is that the site really promotes the fact that you can share everything you post super easily. You can email to your blog, you can blog to your tweets, you can tweet to your blogs, you can Facebook all of it…

I got a bit overwhelmed.

Then an idea came to me. Maybe it’s because at heart I’ll always be a reasonably old-fashioned minded marketing person. Maybe it’s because I’ve been trying to untangle the skein of yarn that is Cloud Computing. Whatever the reason, the following question came to mind. “Why are we sharing everything out when we could be bringing people IN?”

Take Another Little Piece of My Content Now Baby

Currently, I am sending out content in the following ways, directly or indirectly:

Company Website/Company E-Newsletter/Professional Blog/Personal Blog/Facebook Account/Twitter Account/LinkedIn Account/BrainShark.com/3 Email Accounts

Compared to a lot of people, this list is short. Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Buzz, Tumblr, Digg, Delicious, multiple Twitter Accounts, YouTube, Podcasting — the ways you can send information out are getting to seem almost infinite.

Then there’s the sharing and cross-platform stuff that I haven’t really engaged in much yet. My blog imports into LinkedIn. I had my Twitter account importing into LinkedIn for awhile till I realized it imported all of my @ responses. That was a bummer. There are people who can execute a single action, like “liking” a YouTube video, and have that action fed to 3-4 different accounts.

Let’s Bring It In

So here is my dream. You log into your favorite browser, where a central hub is waiting for your input. This central hub has different groups that you can feed content to just by selecting them. If you are posting a professional blog that you want to send out to your LinkedIn network, your company database, and your Twitter account, you select those areas. If it’s a personal photo of your kid riding an elephant at the zoo, you select your Facebook type friends.

On the other side of the dashboard, people could opt in to your communications, and you’d have to approve them for the different groups they’d want to be a part of. If they want to be part of your personal communications yet you don’t know them, they get denied for that content, but maybe could still receive your professional stuff.

Maybe the control panel could also segment types of content. Professional photos go to this group and this group. Professional videos to the same groups. Personal photos just go here.


Web 4.0?

Instead of separate sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I think the future of the web will be the technologies that those sites employ as available to everyone through a personal cloud. Much like we all pay for our internet connections (you do, don’t you??) we would all pay for our content cloud. We’d build our network as we are now, through networking and content generation. But instead of having to click “share this”, or instead of depending upon your network to share an e-newsletter story with other pros in your network, everything would be controlled by you, and all content would go to those who actually want it.

Do you think the web will go this way? What’s your dream about Web 4.0?

Image by Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo, http://www.sxc.hu/profile/mmagallan

So I was thinking this morning that humanity might be headed backwards in the linguistic department. The evolution of language is endlessly fascinating to me. Our little cave man ancestors didn’t have a whole lot going for them in the language department, though they drew some very pretty pictures on cave walls. Slowly but surely, languages developed, then huge language families. By the time of Charles Dickens, people were paid for their writing by the word!

This seems like a rather far cry from where we are now, I have to say. This was brought to my attention most acutely by the new “like a comment” feature on Facebook. Yes, now instead of responding to a comment, you can just click on a picture of a thumb pointed upwards. Just like you can now on YouTube or Flickr or news sites or anywhere else. But the like button on the web is not the only place where our words are disappearing.

Have you noticed that you no longer hear “You’ve Got Mail?” Now it’s a sound or more likely, a flashing light and a sound that tells you to check your mail.

Have you noticed that we don’t talk in words any more thanks to things like Twitter and texting? How many times do you use the @ symbol when setting up a meeting with someone?

We use 🙂 to express happiness.

=/ Means kind of confused or bewildered or disappointed – it’s open to translation.

In fact, maybe you have sent a text message that looked like this:

😮 OMG! 🙂

What IS that?

I like language. Not just English, which happens to be my native tongue, but I love language in general. I love language in every day life and I love language as literature. But I’m a little concerned about language the way things are going. Not that writing in hieroglyphics is a bad thing…it’ll just take some getting used to.

By the way, have you tried this reading test? All of the letters are jumbled, but I bet you can still understand the whole paragraph. Let me know 🙂

Image by Dariusz Rompa. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/dariuszman