Return on Intention

There seems to be a lot of confusion between can’t and don’t when it comes to strategy or execution. There is a tendency to shoot the messenger, as it were, when something goes wrong. If you launch an initiative and it doesn’t product the results you want, it’s pretty important to know why.

There’s a pretty big buzz over the internet and social media (and has been for years). Some people started blogs and were successful. Others started blogs and we’re not. Does that mean blogs don’t work? If you start a hamburger joint and it fails, does that mean that hamburger stands don’t work? No. McDonalds is all the proof you need to say otherwise. 

So many companies who jumped on the bandwagon of getting a “website” or “trying social media” without first considering how it fits into their business feel like they got burned. Most often the channel is blamed. “The internet doesn’t work for my business.” Maybe. Or maybe your strategy was off. Maybe the implementation was off. Most often, in my experience, its because the initiative was called off too soon, or all the factors we’re not considered. Sometimes it was dues to bad or incomplete advise from a “professional” (Read: I know this guy who can build websites / knows facebook and can do it for you cheap on the weekends).

The real work of any initiative starts at the launch. The idea that the work is over at the launch is what causes most executions to fail. Be prepared for the after launch in planning, manpower and budgeting. 

If it can work for a toilet manufacturer, I’m sure it can work for your industry.

Me and my wife met in Tampa, Florida over 10 years. I had an interesting time in Florida, being a transplant from New Mexico, it was quite the culture shocking experience. While we now live in New Mexico, and my wife is now over the culture shock that she faced, we are pretty happy here. There is one thing that could use some work in the beautiful Albuquerque area, and that’s the seafood restaurants. 

Wy wife has spent over 30 years in Tampa before she was dragged across the country to the middle of the desert. She loves seafood. There isn’t alot of seafood in New Mexico. Burritos, Yes. Crab legs, not so much. You can imagine the excitement she felt when during a trip to WalMart we discovered you could buy gift cards to restaurants. In between the gift card for Chili’s and Applebee’s was one for Eat at Joe’s Crab Shack. We had no idea there was a Crab Shack here in New Mexico.  We rushed home and looked on the interweb to find our Albuquerque Crab Shack location only to find that there isn’t one. 

I understand that you could buy one and mail it to someone in another state, but by having this card in there for a restaurant that is 8 eight hours away in another state doesn’t do me much good for local family or friends. What this has essentially done has made me not buy ANY gift cards from WalMart because I have no idea which ones I can use here and which ones I can’t. If that sounds a little silly to you, then I suggest you talk to your customers more. You’d be surprised the things that make them not buy. 

This whole thing could be cleared up with a sign, or some section devoted to local or non-local chains. That is all it would take. Its the simple things that can reduce the barriers to purchase and give you more share of wallet.

We have all heard that word of mouth is the best form of advertising, and there has been no shortage of people trying to figure out how to harness its power . The reason that word of mouth is so effective is because it’s based on trust. If someone I know recommends a restaurant, and I trust that their taste in food is similar to mine, then I will believe that that restaurant is a good place even before I go. This is the expectation part of the brand building equation.

Building the Brand

The expectation part is what makes new customers take action and try a product or service. The second part of building a strong brand is experience. If the experience matches or exceeds the expectation, you have made good on your brand promise and you have gained a customer. While both sides of the equation (Expectation and Experience) are important and require attention and a solid plan to execute well, word of mouth is more about gaining new customers by setting up a favorable expectation. 

WildFire  - Online makes WOM move fast

The need to grow the top line has driven companies into looking for ways to drive word of mouth through influencers (The group of people in any market who can influence the expectations and opinions of many others). The internet, and more specifically, the social web (web 2.0) has spawned many new attempts and avenues to try influencer marketing. If your company can get a popular blogger to recommend your product then the readers of that blog will likely have a positive expectation of you and your product. Blogs, podcasts and other social media channels have made the influencer class even more powerful. No longer does the influencer need to wait for the next cocktail party to work his/her influencing magic to the 40 guests in attendance. Now that influencer can reach hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people every day online.  

Getting in the ball game

With all this great looking potential, it would be silly for any consumer brand to not want to get involved. Of course getting into the social space online to influence the influencers is harder than it might seem. I guess it’s not really hard, but rather it has to be done the right way. Hiring a bunch of bloggers to talk nice about you isn’t going to work. So What Does?

How to get involved

Imagine that you are going to a party, a real one in the real world with real people. Lets assume you don’t know anyone that will be there, but you know one guy who everyone seems to respect and listen to. If you want that person to talk favorably about you or what you do you have two options. 

1. Meet the guy right before the party and ask him if he will tell everyone how great you are if you give him $300, or
2. Go to the parties that he goes to, get to know him and build an honest, favorable impression of yourself so he naturally wants to say good things about you.

As I’m sure you can guess option 2 is going to work the best. Imagine taking option 1 and then having everyone find out about the $300. That will most likely set the wrong expectation. You can’t buy trust. The only problem is that the second and better option takes time. OK, lets drop the metaphor. 

In the business world, time is money. Getting involved will take resources. Getting to the influencers will not be a quick fix. Get to know the people at the party (you market). Let them get to know you. 

Not All Influencers are the Same

The key that makes this whole system work is trust. The word of mouth engine only fires correctly when the influencer is trusted by the people who he/she influences. This can be tricky because there are several types of trust. There is the trust we have in people that make us want to beleive what they have to say (they are not liars), but there is also a smaller unit of trust that if we don’t consider as marketers  this whole system will be a waste of time. 

There is a saying that goes “You may not be able to trust someone, but you can always trust them to be who they are”. Every person has a set of unique knowledge in many different areas. Some people know cars, some know the law and some know marketing. Not everyone knows the same stuff or has the same expertise, but they may all be trustworthy. The difference between these people is what you trust them to know, and not know. Trust them to be who they are.

I have a friend (who will remain nameless) that really loves food. The problem is that his taste in food is very different from mine. I have learned over the years that while I would trust him to watch my kids, I  should avoid the restaurants he likes. I trust that his recommendations don’t work for me where food is concerned. 

This type of trust is also well described in the saying: “Don’t ask you doctor for legal advice”. Make sure the influencers you want to work with are the right fit for you. Make sure that you know them and their audience at least well enough to know if they can be trusted with the type of influence you wish to have. Don’t try and recruit any blogger than seems to have a large audience. Do your research. Read the blog, and the comments. 

Be Transparent

There is no reason to try and hide anything if your intentions are good. Communities need professionals, products, services, advice and organizations so be completely upfront about who you are and what you do. If you sponsor a blogger or podcaster, run any promotions or contest with the influencer make sure you are completely transparent. Do not try to control the community, the influencer or the content the influencer writes.  If people think they don’t have all the facts they will make them up and usually assume the worst. Makes sure everyone knows what’s going on.

Baby Steps

Take your time moving into these arenas. They aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so don’t be in a rush. You can’t rush friendship or love because they are based on trust. Trust cannot be fast-tracked. Building a brand is based on trust too, so take your time and get involved. Most people want to be helpful, so if you need some help don’t hesitate to ask for it.

Mitch Joel has called in the cavalry to help answer the question "Are there best practices in social media "? If you don’t know who Mitch Joel is, he is the president of Twist Image (a Canadian marketing company), a Speaker, an author and the host for Six Pixels of Separation podcast . Yea, Mitch does it all.

My advice for social media marketers is to ensure that you are Adding Value . Social media is different to marketing in traditional channels mainly because it is conversation and community based. Traditional media is geared to interrupt, inform and basically talk AT the consumer. In the social media world, you are talking WITH your market, and they talk back.

When engaged in social media, the marketer is not in control. Even if the marketer wants to be, or tries to be, he/she is not. Like any other community, social media is made of up people who share a common interest. These are people who care so much about a topic that they will spend their free time online talking about it, sharing it, tagging it, creating it and living it. This is a passionate and committed group. They are not there to listen to sales pitches or be talked down too. A common mistake marketers make is to identify a community and immediately jump in trying to push their key messages expecting the community to line up and place orders. THEY ARE NOT SITTING AROUND WAITING FOR YOU. The key here is to try and become a member of the community, not a king that tries to rule over it.

The point of this article is to talk about marketing using social media, not just social media in general. The purpose of marketing is get a person or group to take a specific action or behavior. Most often this is selling a product or service. There is nothing wrong with that. Real world communities have merchants. Having a goal of selling to a community is not a bad thing. How it is done is the difference between success and failure.

The right  approach is to add value. We have all heard the adage "Don’t ask your doctor for legal advice. Ask a lawyer". No one is an expert in everything, and most often the professionals in a field are leaned upon for innovation, knowledge and insight. Professionals, brands and companies are expected to be leaders in their particular field. This works remarkably well considering that most social media marketing has the goal of becoming a thought leader, and therefor the go to guy (company /  brand) when its time for the community members to buy. The goals of the brand and the goals of the community can both be met.

Look at what Mitch is doing with this project, its a great example of adding value and making a win for both his personal brand( and by extension his company Twist Image) and the community in which he thrives. Mitch makes his living by speaking, presenting and having brands hire Twist Image to help them market themselves. In order for the market to want hire Twist Image or Mitch is bcause he is a thought leader. He is a respected professional in his community. To prove his thought leadership, people rely on him to know how to engage the market place successfully, and in this case, social media marketing.

Mitch could have written a blog post that says "I really really know this social media stuff". He could have sent out a message to his facebook group saying "I am awesome and you should all hire me". But he didn’t, because it wouldn’t work. We would all ignore him. Mitch did something much better. He added value.

Right now, some of the most respected members of the social media space (and me) are blogging about the best practices of social media. They are all getting the opportunity to show their thought leadership along with Mitch. This shows that Mitch believes he is on equal footing with his community. This also benefits Mitch because each of these blog posts are sending links to Twist Image’s blog. When the market goes to look for help in social media marketing, they have a really good chance at running into Mitch’s blog. All of these links will also help get Twist Image more google juice (higher search engine rankings). The participants also benefit in two ways. Their posts are now linked through tags , so their post has a better chance of being seen by the market place demonstrating their thought leadership and we all benefit from Mitch pulling together this information into one place we can all share. Everyone wins. The community got value, Mitch looks smart but humble. If you are considering marketing in the social media space start by asking "How can I (my company / brand) add value to this community", not "How am I going to get all these people to buy". A good way to find out is to listen .

Here are a few articles I want to pass along. Happy reading.

Would you buy the cow?

The Psychology of Numbers in PPC Ads

As a culture, we seem to have an obsession with features. We always want it to do more and do it faster. Or, at lease thats what we think we want. 

In marketing, having more features does not mean “better”. In software, having more features isn’t better either. What more features will do is make things complicated. In marketing its hard to get across a compelling message when there are 8 pretty good messages. Good is the enemy of great. Its the same deal in software. The more options you have the more buttons you need. The more buttons you have the more crowded the UI (user interface) becomes making the software harder to use. 

One of the biggest reasons we go feature crazy is because when we are trying to grow our business, or create a new product in the market place, we tend to believe that adding one more feature will make our product stand out. Sometimes this is true, but if you do enough iterations of this processes, you end up with a mess. Sometimes finding a better, more elegant way of doing the same thing is a better proposition that trying to do more things.

The success of Palm was attributed to their resistance to feature creep. The Palm doesn’t do everything, but what it did do, it did well. This is also the reason that Basecamp is so successful. If you want full featured software, go away. If you want elegant software that works really well, buy from Apple… I mean use Basecamp (sorry, I try to control the Mac Freak within).

Whether in marketing communication, or software development, focus and elegance should be first priority. If that fails, add some new features .

I received a flyer, home made and printed in black and white attached to my front door knob by rubber band a few days ago. This is a common occurrence in my neighborhood. I guess the slowing economy is making a lot of people search for different sources of income. What I found particularly interesting about this is that it was advertising two things. The top half of the flyer was showcasing a home based massage studio, but the bottom half was trying to sell a reusable shopping bag.

The headline read “Help save the environment. Stop filling our land fill with grocery store bags.” Then came some copy about how grocery store bags are not reused because they were so weak so most end up in the trash, and then the call to action was to buy a nice cloth reusable shopping bag.  All in all for a homegrown flyer it wasn’t bad. I’ve seen some “professional” copywriters do worse. The only problem with the message was the media.

I got this flyer from my front door. So did all of my neighbors. There are probably at least 350 houses in my subdivision, and they all got the flyer on their doors. I can’t help but think that all those flyer went in the trash. The flyer about reducing trash and being responsible… went in the trash… about 350 of them. That message, while unintended, was loud and clear to me.