Return on Intention

As more companies become familiar with the existence of social media and the success stories given at just about every conference held, it has become very common to hear “I would use Facebook / Twitter / Whatever, but I just never know what to say.” This problem was the cause for so many people posting “I like pickles” or “I had eggs for breakfast” on Twitter in the early days as they tried to figure out what to say. Often this lack of knowing what to post is a symptom of something bigger than understanding a new medium. Often its based on the organization not really understanding their uniqueness or their brand promise and how it fits into its customers lives. To put it another way, they don’t really understand where they fit into their market. If you make English Muffins, a product that hasn’t really changed in decades, what could you possibly have to post on Facebook? Plenty.

First – a little back story. I have this terrible habit of working late into the night… or morning… depending on how you look at it. After working past midnight a few times, getting up in the morning becomes a bit harder, so you sleep an extra hour to make up for the one that you worked through the night before. Now that you get up an hour later, you don’t get tired and go to bed when you used to and you have to wait an extra hour before you can go to sleep. Follow this path for a while and pretty soon you work until 3 or 4 in the morning and get up at 10:00.  This has been my life off and on for the past few years. This caused me to not eat breakfast anymore because after getting showered, dressed and ready for the day it was nearly lunch time. On days when I had meetings in the mornings and had to get up at a normal time I still couldn’t eat breakfast because it would make me feel ill, so I hadn’t had breakfast in years.

Recently I have been working to switch my waking hours back to a schedule that more closely resembles normal human times. Now, after being awake for a few hours, its breakfast time, not lunch time. This has presented me with the joy of breakfast food shopping and tasting, which has probably been way more fun than it really should have been. So now, after about a month of testing I have decided that English Muffins are better than bagels. Why? The nooks and crannies.

The crumb of an English Muffin are airy and full of little pockets that hold flavor. Every bite is a bit different as some of the little pockets are filled with butter, and others with raspberry jam. A bagel with cream cheese pretty much tastes the same in each bite, but an English Muffin is just a bit different. Bagels don’t have nooks and crannies. The crumb of a bagel is pretty smooth, which makes it more like most other breads. You can make interesting sandwiches with a bagel, but you can make all the same sandwiches with any other bread. The biggest difference between the English Muffin and just about all other breads you would eat for breakfast is the pocket filled crumb. This key differentiator not only makes the English Muffin a unique looking morning snack, but it also makes the taste and experience of the Muffin a unique one with the butter or jam that fills up the pockets. The point is that the English Muffin is not just about the English Muffin, but is part of my morning experience that works in concert with other factors to bring me satisfaction. When brands can stand back and see how their products and services fit into the bigger picture of their customers lives they can see how their unique features stretch beyond themselves and influence the user. With this data, the brand can start to see a bigger picture, and thats when the ideas for what kind of conversation to have with their market start to perk up like a pot of fresh coffee.

Standard economic theory says the value of a good or service is directly related to the supply of that good or service in contrast to the market’s desire for that good or service. Simple supply and demand. If there is a high supply and low demand, the value is lower. If the supply is low and demand is high, the value is higher. What does this have to do with blogging? Everything.

This isn’t just a blogging problem, but a problem for all social media channels. The early theory of social media was that anyone could publish and we as a community could produce content just as good as the broadcast media, if not better. The best part of social media channels is that you don’t have to interact with concepts, topics or brands that you don’t want to interact with. When you watch TV, you have to watch whatever commercial comes on, but on social media channels, you can pick and choose what is most relevant to you. This is where the problem starts. In order to participate you have to be able to find what is most relevant to you. With new blogs being started everyday, the supply side of equation is exploding.

Let’s say you are really into pig farming. You can stay up to date on the industry of pork farming by reading blogs that cover that market. If there are only a few blogs, then great, you can stay up on the times pretty easily. Now imagine that there are over 1,000 blogs on pork farming. You can’t read them all—you’ve got pigs to farm. So what do you read and what don’t you read? And what about all the podcasts, Facebook groups and Ning sites? You can’t keep up, and trying to becomes a time-consuming pain. Staying on top of the industry is harder now with all of the choices.

When there was one blog on the subject, it was very valuable.  There wasn’t any pain involved in keeping up when it was simple. But now if there are 100 or 1,000 blogs, you can’t read them all, so you pick a few and stick with them. Now if you read four, then each of them is only a quarter of the value that the first one was. The tragic part is that the first blog on the subject is probably still as relevant as ever. Blogging is hard work, but the value is diminished by each new entrant regardless of how hard the first blogger works.

To have a successful blog, podcast, or personal brand you have to have a reputation for providing value to your community. This hasn’t changed and never will, but now you have to work harder just to be as valuable as you were before. This becomes even more true if you are just starting out now. Building a reputation for value in a sea of competition is harder than fighting a value recession. Perhaps its time to think about that blog or podcast you’ve been meaning to start.

Advertising, and marketing communications are generally viewed as an unwanted intruder. If you get it in your mail box it’s called junk mail. If you get it in your email it’ s spam. This view is not based on marketing communications being inherently bad, but rather it has come about from years of marketers and communication professionals sending irrelevant messages to us. If it’s irrelevant it becomes irritating. Basically, as marketers we have done this to ourselves. Most often I don’t think this was done intentionally and certainly not maliciously, but rather because we had mass media, so we got used to (and rewarded) for getting the message out to as many people as possible. The industry got too focused on quantity over quality.

Email is a great example. Email is so easy and inexpensive to use that spam has gotten out of control. When you are judged by the size of your list it becomes more important to blast out to 5 million than it is to blast to the 5 thousand that should get it.  As it stands, email is a fantastic medium. Social media is the new hot thing, but you don’t always want to talk about doing business in the middle of the party. Look at email as “Private Media”, the corner of the room where you and your buddy go to get away from the rest of the party just for a few seconds to really engage with each other. Email can be powerful, but not if its just a conduit for spam. Here is how to make sure you do it right.

Clean your list

Forget quantity. Go for quality. Look at your open rates and systematically cut out the bottom 10%. If they aren’t opening your emails then sending it to them makes no sense. Its a good idea to send them a plain text only email first, making sure they still want to be on the list. If they don’t, or don’t respond, remove them.

Segment your list

Not all your customers are the same. There are groups in your list that  have different interests. Segmenting your lists, and then sending different emails to each group that has more of the types of content they want will make your email more valuable to them. When the information is valuable, then its not considered spam. This is easiest, and most overlooked part of good email marketing, but it can make all the difference in the world.

I used to have a windows mobile phone. I was on Tmobile, and that was the most powerful phone at the time. Then the iPhone came along and I decided I had to have it (its no secret that I’m an apple fan ). As soon as my contract was up with Tmobile I immediately bought an iPhone. Boy am I much happier. There are some really cool features, but the by far the most important one is the fact that it browses the real internet and looks good while doing it. Many phones in mobile-internet-past browsed a different version of the web then you would see from your desktop computer. This version of the web  was much more restrictive and less useful, but now with the iPhone that web is gone.

On my old windows mobile phone I could browse the real web, but it couldn’t handle the display of it very well, making most of the web pages useless and unusable. I have been able to browse the web from my phone for about 3 years now, but it wasn’t until now that it has become usable, and that makes me use it even more. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so, there are now more iPhones in use than Windows Mobile phones.

The iPhone isn’t the only phone that browses the real web, most new smart phones are doing the same. This has some pretty big implications for the web, but it also has a really big one for brands. The web has just gotten more important because people can go see a website about a company they are considering doing business with from their phone right before a purchase. There are a few minor points related to this, like make sure that your website looks better than your competitors, and your website should still be usable on a small screen, but as the apps available on the iPhone remind us, the real point is to make sure your website is worth going to. Make sure it does something. There needs to be a reason for people to go to your website, and reading corporate speak isn’t a good reason.

So many businesses don’t even have a good digital strategy much less a good mobile one. With these new versions of smart phones and other mobile devices that can browse the web (ebook readers, ipods … cars) the webs importance will only grow greater. Give coupons, special content, up to the minute news or an experience that is worth the effort, and make sure it looks good on a small screen.

NOTE: As I was finishing this post, I had to go look for the ReadWriteWeb post I read yesterday to make the above car link point to the right place. As I was going through my Google Reader account to find the post, I ran across a post from Mitch Joel entitled What A Website Will Be… And Never Be that talks about the mobile web. It’s definitely worth the read.

Usually the topic of integration in a marketing and business development context is based on the idea of integrating a cohesive message or marketing campaign through multiple channels or disciplines. The concept is to come up with the “Big Idea” that meets the strategic goals of the organization, and then deliver that big idea through all the relevant media channels like TV, radio, print and the web. This idea is for the most part sound, but its greatest problem does not lie in theory, but the ability to achieve this integration in a successful way.

The skills that it takes to make a good TV campaign and a good digital (web) campaign are very different. With TV you have writers, directors, production crews and a whole slew of technical knowledge on how to operate a camera, capture good audio and the best way to frame a shot that can take many years to learn and become effective at. In digital you have the same scenario with specialized knowledge about user experience, human computer interaction, markup and programming that isn’t found in other mediums. Because of these vast difference in technical knowledge its easy to see why there aren’t many professional service firms that can offer world class solutions in every medium. Even if you could find one, the overhead of that business would be huge just from employing such a vast labor pool that their fee structure would be out of reach for most business owners.

In years past, the concept of who should be the “lead” agency has seen a fair share of heated debate. Some say it should be the advertising guys because of their knowledge of consumers and generating the “Big Idea”. Some say it should be the PR folks because they understand how to communicate best. There has even been speculation from some of the largest advertising trade magazines that it should be the digital agencies because they have the audience and ability to track behavior better than any other discipline. At the end of the day its still not clear who the winner of this debate should be, or that there ever should or could be a clear winner. This argument does illustrate that, if nothing else, there is no agreed upon right answer.

Somewhere in the combination of the widely varying difference in skill sets from one media to another and the murky uncertainty as to who is best suited to try and work it all out, this makes creating a successful fully integrated campaign a problem of organization just as much as it is strategy. The responsibility of creating a successful endeavor falls upon the client. Over the next few years expect to see more movement as the disrupted industries of marketing and communication learn to deal with  the new digital world. It seems that on top of everything else that a client side marketing manager or CMO has on their plate a whole new level of technical complexity will now be required. This will result in either larger in house marketing staff on the client side, new planning positions on the client side to offset the need for a lead agency or a change in the agency world to take into account the new required disciplines.

I’m not sure how this will all work out, but perhaps a good idea is for both clients and agencies to ponder “what isn’t digital anymore.” Perhaps the digital agencies will go away as it becomes less of an ancillary discipline and is absorbed into business as usual, or perhaps the digital agencies will win out as they acquire the relevant knowledge traditional housed at the Advertising and PR firms. Can you hear it? Its the winds of change.

The trend of websites (or other online presence) being the first point a potential customer comes into contact with a brand continues to grow. First impressions are lasting so getting this introduction right is pretty important. There are many opportunities to get feedback on how your online first impressions are going, such as survey tools like 4Q from iPerseptions and Avinash Kaushik or simply asking your customers. You can also glean some insight from your web analytics – look at things like bounce rate and page views per visit. These can identify how people are using your site, giving you some quantitative results, while the surveys and user polls give you qualitative results.

Always proceed with your best judgment, but then take the time to set up a feedback / improvement system to continually improve. Like many things on the web, getting this part right is usually done faster through quick test and improve cycles rather than months of contemplating the right move.

The key here is make sure that you are offering an experience for your user. Pay attention to not only what you are saying, but how your are saying it, and how it all looks. A good combination of content, presentation and interaction are the cornerstones of a good experience, so long as its unique.

Being unique is critical. With so much competition out there on the world wide web, it is easy to forget or get confused about who is who. Getting around this problem is the process of building a brand. Too often, however, people try to take a shortcut and end up shooting themselves in the foot.

Remember splash pages? Thankfully most of these monstrosities are now gone, but there was a time when the “splash page” was running rampant and out of control. Part of this tragedy can be linked to the early idea of the web being the new television, but a lot more of it had to do with trying to take an experience short cut. Instead of spending the time to make a compelling experience, these folks tried to throw so much sizzle at us in flashing, fast moving graphics hoping to blind us from the lack of steak.

While splash pages are now mostly gone, the tendency to take this short cut still exists. It is a good idea to try and be clever and push the envelop, but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This line comes in the form of the “use your mouse to chase down the moving navigation elements” and other such ill-conceived ideas. The biggest problem is that it can be hard to know where this line is until you’ve crossed it. Getting the user to chase your page elements around is interactive and can even be fun the first time, but when the novelty wears off it becomes frustrating and a waste of time. Its kind of like a one night stand. It seems like a fun adventure, but it’s no way to build a long lasting solid relationship. No one wants to be with (or be) the guy who is a lot of fun for the first few minutes but then falls short after that. Don’t let your first impression online be that guy. Marriages are built with the consistent guy, not the party guy. Spend 10 minutes on your own site everyday for a few weeks and see if you can find where it falls short.

Imagine a time way back before the internet. Before television. Before indoor plumbing. The year is 1805, and you’re a baker.

In the middle of the town is a common. If you are not familiar with commons its pretty much what it sounds like, common area used by all the towns folk to keep their livestock, plant gardens, etc. The commons is where the town gathered, worked and talked about the news of the day.  To be a successful business, it made sense to put your business on the land facing the commons. Location, Location, Location, right? The age old philosophy of “go where your customers are” was very important before yellow pages and search engines. So there you are, in your bakery on the edge of the commons, accessible to anyone in town who may want a loaf of wheat bread.

Relationships were the driver of business in this time. The people who chose to buy from a particular baker most likey did so because they  built a relationship with them day after day of talking in the commons or at the bakers shop. People liked to buy from people they know. To increase bread sales, the baker could go out into the commons after the morning rush and offer discounts to try his bread, or he could start an affinity program. The baker could also hire some local kids to sell his goods for a percentage of the profit, starting an early affiliate program. No matter what the plans where to keep the business going strong, it relied on personal relationships (at least personal as in “in person”).

It would be entirely possible for the baker to bake his goods at home, and then build a stand to sell out of in the commons. By doing this he wouldn’t actually need a storefront of his own, and he could just make his money from the stand he built. This works until the customers either leave the commons to go a new area, or the commons get purchased and his stand is longer allowed to be there. In either case, the work that he put into creating his stand, and making it accessible and comfortable to customers is all lost.

Fast forward a few hundred years to today. The commons are back. There called social networks. In much the same way as our earlier ancestors, businesses are realizing that building relationships with people can pay off. All the advantages ( and disadvantage) from back then are all back, and community is the new topic to pay attention to. With all the ways you can now reach out to your customers base, the question has been raised as to whether or not a company really needs a website anymore. There are so many new services out there like Facebook and Twitter that customers spend time on that it can seem like a companies website isn’t where the people are; however, what was true in 1805 is still true today.

The point of a company having a website is to control its online domain – the space that is theirs. Thats why they are called Domain Names. Companies could spend all day on Facebook just like our baker could have spent all day in the commons, but if the commons ever became unavailable, he was out of luck. Today, the online equivalent is actually even worse. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and may not be the last. At some point someone will create a new social network that people think is better and they will jump ship and move to that one. Facebook did it to MySpace, and MySpace did it to Friendster before that. When that day comes, then all the hard work that was poored into Facebook will be gone. I don’t mean to pick on Facebook, pick any social networking platform you want, its the same deal. 200,000 Twitter followers won’t do you much good when Twitter shuts down.

The point here is to go ahead and go out into the social media world and explore. Experiment and learn. Leverage its technology to build community and its power to build your business. Do as much as you can, but always maintain your home turf. Maintain your website. Use it to give your customers an experience that Facebook doesn’t provide them. Make it the center of your universe, just like the bread store on the edge of the commons.