A Conversation with Your Customers

With the advent of the Internet and various social media, marketing has become a conversation with your customers. Back in 2000, The Cluetrain Manifesto made it clear that marketers would not succeed in the Internet future without major retooling.

What does this mean? Well, put yourself in the place of your customers: If you want to talk to a vendor about buying products or services, do you call their marketing department?
No, because you don't want to hear how the product slices and dices and does everything but walk your dog.

Do you want to talk to a salesperson? Maybe, but only if you already have the information you need to make an informed buying decision and simply want to negotiate.

So, if you don't yet have enough information to make up your mind, who do you want to talk to? If you're a technical person looking for a technical product or solution, you probably want to talk to one of the vendor's technical people. You want a peer-to-peer conversation with someone who understands their technology and your needs.

If an informed customer is your best friend, then the curiosity of your customers is your best sales tool. Help them help you. Make the information they need accessible, authoritative, concise and complete.

"All Mouth and No Trousers"

I just ran across this phrase in BNET's coverage of the 2010 Super Bowl ads. It's a British expression that approximates the more common (in North America) "all talk and no action," and BNET used it to describe one of the ads that aired, and the failure of public reaction to live up to the ad's pre-game hype. In other words, the ad was a bust.

How did they figure that out so quickly? Enter Internet technology and social media. Brand Bowl 2010 was created to measure viewer reaction via the "Twittersphere."

Before you get too excited about a new age of accountability in old media advertising, consider this stat from BNET: "while the dollar cost of an ad on the Super Bowl has increased more than 6,900 percent, the effective per-viewer cost has tripled since 1984."

So, in 1984, when 85.5 million people watched the Chicago Bears beat the New England Patriots, a 30-second ad cost $525,000, or roughly 1 cent per set of eyeballs. This year, as approximately 90 million viewers (the "Who Dat" nation) watched the Saints trounce the Colts, a 30-second ad cost about $3 million, or roughly 3 cents per viewer. However, to really make an effective impression, the big brands had to run multiple spots. Doritos, for example, ran at least three different spots.

For the rest of us, who do not have a $9 million advertising budget on any given Sunday, the medium is definitely all mouth and no trousers.

And now for my favorite ad:



The reading glasses hanging from his t-shirt -- great touch.

(Full disclosure: I am a life-long Packers fan, and remain a Brett Favre fan.)

Ascent - Opportunity Meets Planning, Dedication and Determination

A year ago, my nephew climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, with the assistance of professional guides, and after months of conditioning work with a personal trainer. His stories upon his return were fascinating, but what impressed me most was the planning, dedication and determination with which he pursued his dream.

Dreams are just dreams unless you apply all of your physical, mental and financial resources to achieve them. An inspirational message for dire economic times.

Happy Groundhog Day - Business as Usual?

Ever since Harold Ramis and Bill Murray got together in 1993 to make Groundhog Day, the day has taken on added cultural significance. This day has always marked the dead of winter, and the hope of spring, but it's also now a reminder of how we can get stuck in a rut, repeating the same old rituals day in and day out, business as usual.

And of course, there's the definition of insanity: repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting a different result.

Well, business as usual isn't good enough any more -- not in this economic climate. If you don't pursue new business aggressively and efficiently, you too can experience Groundhog Day every day, just like Bill Murray did.

Lean marketing requires you to examine the processes by which you aim to achieve your sales & marketing objectives. When you analyze processes, you can make continuous improvements, and achieve more sales opportunities at a lower cost, and thus more profitable revenue, improving both your top and your bottom line.

Website Evolution and Profitable Revenue

A rather long and complex post to make a simple point, I'm afraid, but process is everything.

I've been reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, which is a powerful presentation of the evidence for evolution, and I've been impressed by his skillful use of analogy in making his case. Analogies are like cars: they all eventually break down (as this one is about to do). Analogies are useful as aids to understanding (as cars are not).

In fact, analogies are not only useful: they are necessary, because our understanding of the world we inhabit is largely figurative. Have you ever wondered why so many things taste like chicken? It's because we cannot express what the taste of something is (except as a chemical reaction, which would be meaningless to the vast majority); instead we have to understand our taste experience by comparison. We don't ask what the taste of a strawberry is. We ask what a strawberry tastes like.

But I digress.

Dawkins externalizes his search for appropriate analogies for evolution. He lets us in on his thought processes and his reservations, which is a good thing, since the audience he is really trying to reach (most likely in vain, I'm afraid) are linguistic literalists, the people who believe in the literal truth of the mythic, and as a result, that the age of the Earth is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years.

Once more I digress.

One of the analogies that Dawkins tosses aside as inadequate and misleading is the comparison of DNA with a blueprint. When you build a house from a blueprint, you know where the roof trusses are going to go before you lay the foundation. This is top-down design. We can think of DNA as a set of instructions, but in order for DNA to be a top-down blueprint for the born/hatched/germinated instance of life, it would have to contain an exponentially greater number of instructions.

A more fitting analogy for the way that embryologic life develops is the recipe. If you look at a building carefully, you can reverse engineer it and come up with a blueprint. You can't do the same thing with a cake. A recipe does not describe a finished result. It is a set of instructions that sets a process in motion toward a not-completely-predictable result.

But, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, that's not what I came here to talk about. I came here to talk about websites, and my point is really quite simple.

Your website should be a living, breathing entity. It is never done developing, so you can't start with a "final" state in mind. Instead, you need to start with a recipe, with a set of ingredients that interact to achieve objectives. You're not building a cathedral, and visitors don't come to your website to worship. Your website is not a one-time investment or a cost of doing business. It is an ongoing budget line and a profit centre. For most businesses, it is the key to more profitable revenue, because it drives down the cost of opportunities.

Think of your website as an ongoing dinner party with your customers, during which you engage in mutually beneficial, sparkling conversation. The courses change, but their purpose remains as a vehicle for that conversation.

When you are developing your website, you primary considerations should be your objectives, a recipe for success, and the ingredients you need to begin the process.

Social Media Breaks Replacing Cigarette Breaks

Two trends that go together like hand and glove: the rise of smartphones, and the rise of social media. So, if you suspect the person in the next cubicle has started smoking again, think again. There is a growing probability that he or she is sneaking off for a social media break.

Over at Harvard Business School, David Armano has published his Six Social Media Trends for 2010, and the social media break is one of them.

Define Social Media

Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmark Study shows that social media adoption for B2B marketing and PR purposes is growing, but I think the usefulness of the study is marred by its overly expansive (though unstated) definition of social media.

Is a podcast a social medium? When I think of people plugged into their iPods and notebooks on commuter trains, my first impulse is to define podcasts as antisocial media, but this of course begs the question:

What are social media?

The most basic definition is that social media is many-to-many as opposed to one-to-many communications. For me this rules out podcasts, because they are a one-way communication, rather than a conversation.

Another defining aspect of social media is that they are peer-to-peer. For me this rules out webinars, because webinars almost always involve a supposed expert lecturing to an audience wishing to learn from that expert's expertise.

Blogs can be considered social media, but they have to be considered on a case-by-case basis, because their status as social media depends on their operating principles. For example, a blog is not much of a conversation if the comments are turned off or heavily censored by moderation.

As always, I welcome your thoughts.