Return on Intention

 Return On Intention Episode 13 – Complacency part 2 of 3 [48:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Return On Intention Episode 13 – Complacency part 2 of 3

In this episode Daniel Lyons, programmer and all around smart guy talks with Reid Givens about:

• Complacency – its not just a technology problem
• Why do somethings win and somethings fail
• Free, Simple, Chance, Rumors and other means of competition
• How do your new customers pick you? It may not be Times are a changin’
• Does fast moving technology change who you should listen to?
• Who should be in the lead – digital shops or ad agencies?
• If everything changes every 2 years, who’s a master at anything?
• The new war online – splitting the groups and standards The circle of life on the web
• Where does the next big thing come from?
• Conversion rates and Ad supported revenue models
• iAds – overprices or reaching better customers
• The promise of social media – did we miss it?
• Facebook tried … and failed, but who’s fault was it?
• Pandora – algorithms, ads and revenueFunnels, permission marketing where the focus is
• Is advertising bad, or do we just do bad advertising?

Running Time: 48 minutes 46 seconds.

Comment email - comments {at} reidgivens {dot} com

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.

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.

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.

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.