Quitting

I am reading Seth Godin's The Dip right now and finding the simple little book is really quite nerve-rattling and disturbing.  I think that it is because it speaks such truth!  In the 40 pages I have read so far (about half of the book) he has me rethinking a lot of the truths I held self-evident up to this point!  I encourage you to check it out.  I am attaching a link to the blog that discusses the concepts of the Dip.  I will write more on this soon!

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/

Put a Stamp On It

So let me get this straight.

The Postmaster General told Congress that the Post Office is losing revenue because more and more people are using email instead of first class mail.

So his solution out of this crisis is to slow down the mail, and take away a delivery day.  In other words, the Postmaster General's answer to the lure of email, is to make first class mail even LESS desirable to use.

Are you kidding me?

The Dragnet Approach

A while back, when I worked at an ad agency, a client told me one day that he wanted an ad that didn't sound like an ad.  Actually, I think that is what most clients want from their ad agencies, but this guy was the first one to express it so succinctly to me.

There is a very simple strategy to writing an ad that doesn't read like an ad, a sales pitch that doesn't sound like a sales pitch, an excuse that doesn't sound like an excuse.  Tell the truth.  A colleague of mine used to call this the Dragnet Approach.  Just the facts, ma'am.

The truth, told in a straightforward and direct manner, will resonate with the reader or the listener.  More advertisers don't use the Dragnet approach because it is harder.  In the short term.

Words Matter

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."  -- Rudyard Kipling

Words matter.  The world is full of anonymous geniuses who didn't have the words to express their brilliance.  The difference between a great leader and a manager is not much more than the ability to generate and excite followers through the right words delivered in a skillful, emotional way.

Pay attention to what you say and write, because the words you use determines what people think of you.  Pay attention to how you say it, because the delivery of your words is how people remember you!

Babies and Bathwater

There is an old saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."

My interpretation of this saying is that as you are getting rid of things you don't want, or no longer need (in this case the bathwater), be careful that you don't also get rid of something valuable (i.e. the baby).

In our current media and communication milieu, many companies are throwing out the bathwater of their traditional PR plans.  With tools like Twitter and Facebook, the thinking often goes, who needs newspapers (or radio or TV)?  With websites and e-newsletters and video conferencing, who would ever again pay to place a print ad or struggle to get their message into 30 seconds with music?

But here's the thing:  very similar things were said about newspapers and magazines more than 100 years ago when commercial radio became popular and the same thing about radio (and newspapers and magazines) when television joined the media fracas.  And newspapers and magazines and radio are still around and by most accounts, doing OK.

More importantly, those "traditional media" are still delivering visibility and audiences for those advertisers who use them wisely.

You see, I think new media tends to be additive, not replacing, in nature.  Each new media adds something new to the customer experience, but most don't really replace the old.  And even if it does replace those experiences for some, there are still many many many people who cling to their newspapers or radio programs with strength and conviction.

Traditional media also evolves.  Radio stations we have today are remarkably different than the first radio networks, but no less vibrant or vital of a media.  

So, when you are thinking of throwing "traditional media" out the window with that bathwater, you really need to calculate if you really can do without all of those customers who don't have access to new media, who don't care to have access, or that want access, but can't figure out how to use it, so they don't.

Tell Stories

I have been working this week on a presentation I will be giving at a conference in a couple of weeks.  I found myself getting tired of putting together the PowerPoint presentation.

As I was discussing the presentation with the colleague I am giving the presentation with, I realized that our conversation focused mostly on the stories we were planning to tell, not the slides that would be flashing up on the screen.  The stories are what gave both of us energy.  What interested us most as presenters.

I know the same is true for me when I am in the audience.  Give me a pithy story or real life situation to make your point, and I am with you.  Tell a tale, perform a role play, spin a yarn and I am more likely to remember your point, or at least pay attention!

But if you toss up a bunch of overly wordy, hard to read slides...or even beautifully designed, pithy slides and just read from them...pretty soon I will be wondering what I am going to do for lunch and whether I remembered to turn off the coffee pot.  Use PowerPoint (if you must) to accent or highlight your stories, not to tell them.  People want to hear you tell them the stories and lessons, not read about it on a screen.

After all, there is a reason they call it a speech, and not a show.

After Midnight

The thing is our expectations have changed.

We have gotten used to an Internet that is always there, McDonald's that are always open, and banks (a few) that answer the phone with a live person 24/7.

So when I encounter the dreaded "office hours" message, indicating that the organization I am trying to do business with isn't there because it is after their "normal business hours" I get wanderlust.  I don't know that I want to wait until 8 am Eastern on Monday to do business with company A, when Company B will let me spend my money with them after midnight on Sunday.

Honesty, Integrity and Car Repair

I have a habit of not liking car payments, so I tend to keep cars as long as possible.  While it is nice not having to write the monthly check to the car company, a result of this strategy is that I spend more time than I would like in the repair shop.  Having become a bit of an involuntary expert, I have noticed that there is a wide range in the quality of service that you receive at such an establishment.

I have recently found a place that has figured out how to focus on the important things.  They DON'T have Starbucks coffee and donuts in their waiting room.  Actually, they barely have a waiting room.  What they do have is great record-keeping.  They know the cars like a doctor should know her patients.  What they do have is great service.  Even if you just come in for an oil change they will do a free engine evaluation for you.  But most importantly, what they do have is trustworthy, believable personnel.  I have had them recommend against doing a repair.  I have had them tell me to wait to get something fixed, or to go somewhere else where a service would be cheaper.  Because of that, when the DO recommend something, I tend to believe them more. I also come back when I need service.

Honesty, integrity and service always have been and always will be the best marketing strategy there is!

100 years later, is Wanamaker still speaking the truth?

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." 

                                          John Wanamaker (1838 - 1922)

 
Is Mr. Wanamaker's oft-cited pearl of wisdom still accurate today?

There is no doubt that the art/science of advertising has changed since the early 20th century.  With new communications channels popping up almost daily, both audiences and advertisers have more choices on where to spend their time, attention and money.  We have a greater ability to collect data on who views our messages and what they do after they view the message than we did 100 years ago, when Mr. Wanamaker was espousing his frustration about marketing budgets.  We can track everything visitors do when they come to our website, read our twitter, or stop by our blog.  We can tell where they came from, how long they stayed, and what they looked at while they were here.  We can, more accurately and with greater detail, compile and aggregate customer and prospect information to create customer profiles, matching purchasing behavior with electronic media use; past purchase behavior with current activity, and even search engine searches with a wide range of demographic data.

I am wondering if advertisers can use ALL this data to figure out which half of the advertising budget is wasted?  And if they can, do they?  And if they do, does yesterday's data accurately predict tomorrow's behaviors, given the rapid growth of communications channels and the splintering of the media audience?

If Mr. Wanamaker were alive today, I wonder what he would be tweeting about his advertising budget?

Social Media: Quality vs. quantity

The other day I read an email from a friend and colleague who had written to me on LinkedIn asking for a favor.   The problem is that she had written me several weeks before I had read the email, and now the favor was a moot point.  The problem wasn't that I had just ignored her request, the problem was I didn't see it until it was weeks old.  I didn't see it because of the volume of message I get from LinkedIn has caused me to turn the volume way down on those messages.

Don't get me wrong.  I am not suggesting that I am so popular or so important on LI that massive amounts of people send me messages to get my perspective or advice.  Rather, I have adopted the strategy of being what is called an Open Networker.  The philosophy of an Open Networker, as I understand it, is that no contact is a bad contact.  That the advantages of social media multiply if you accrue a larger network of contacts.  While I never got caught up in the arms race that some LI open networkers get in, trying to have the most connections, I also have not hesitated to accept link requests from people with little or no obvious connection to me.

I have had the belief that a larger network would serve me best by giving me a larger pool of references and a greater resource of opinions when I have posted a query.  While this proved true and useful when I was first using LI, as more of my "real" contacts have started using LI as a means of connection and communication, it appears to have become counterproductive.

So the question I pose to the blogosphere is this:  which is better, quantity or quality when it comes to connections in social media.  I realize that there are some differences between LI, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.  I am interested in whether people have strong opinions, relevant experience, or a pithy comment or two regarding contacts in social media.  What are the advantages to open networking?  What are the disadvantages?  I will be posting a link to this blog on all my social media sites (LI, Twitter & Facebook)  I am hoping to be educated and enlightened by my open network!

Luddites

In an article in this month's Fast Company on Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke University, there is a quote I quite like.  Davidson is a Duke English professor and co-founder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) a "network of academics inspired by new technology..."

At the end of the article, Davidson, who is in her 50s, expresses frustration with some of her generation who are ignoring or resisting the new technologies and the new realities brought on by those technologies.

"When I hear from those 40-year-old, 50-year-old Luddites, I'm thinking, What else is wrong in your life that you have to make such a wall?  If you're worried about distraction, something else is going on."

Horizons

Good marketing is the building and nurturing of relationships.

Relationships are not built in one day or over one campaign or really on one issue.

A good marketer, therefore, should always keep an eye on the horizon, even while tackling the work of the day.

Acceptable losses

I had a boss once who talked about some customers who had a lot of complaints as "acceptable losses."  His feeling was that if the number wasn't too high, having some irreconcilable customers (or former customers) was just the cost of doing business.

My first instinct was, and is, to resist that philosophy.  Every customer is golden.  Every customer is worth fighting for.  The customer is always right.  I questioned, in my naivete, how my boss could be so cavalier about letting a valuable customer slip through our fingers when with more effort we probably could repair and save the relationship.

What I failed to realize at first was that my boss wasn't rejecting customer services altogether.  Actually, he was a strong proponent of it and a skilled practitioner.  Rather, his stance on "acceptable losses" was my first experience of Pareto's Law being put into practice.  You know Pareto, who told us that 20% of the customers cause 80% of the problems or, similarly, that 85 % of the profits come from 15% of the purchasers  and so on.  If you aren't familiar with Pareto and his principal, you can read more here.

What my boss was really doing was trying to get a team of relatively naive sales people to focus their finite customer service resources where they would do the most good, both for the company and for the morale of that relatively naive sales force!  There are customers, he would contend, that we would never satisfy, or only satisfy with herculean effort.  Better, he would suggest, to let those customers move on and take up the time and resources of someone else, perhaps our competitors. We should spend the same effort we would have spent satisfying one customer to satisfy 5 or 10 or 50 customers.

Seems like 20% of the bosses teach 80% of the lessons worth learning.

Day Moon

I still get a geeky, wonders-of-nature thrill when the moon is visible during the day.  A day moon is always unexpected (at least to me) and always gets me thinking about the astrophysics of it all.

Think about what you can do to provide geeky thrills and to capture the stream of thought of your customers and prospects by doing something unexpected and different.

Graduations

I have had the opportunity recently to attend a couple of high school graduations, including my daughter's.  The ceremonies are almost always similar with short (hopefully!) speeches reminiscent of the glorious four years just past or philosophical about the years coming up.  High School, at graduation ceremonies, is portrayed as a great incubator of young men and women; a soft-focus frolic through four years with crazy but lovable teachers and mischievous but lovable classmates.  Triumphs are remembered.  Defeats and failures are not.  Everyone leaves graduation feeling good about their their past and hopeful about their future.

I am convinced that graduation ceremonies are one of the reasons so many people generally remember their high school experience as positive.

Some business have seemingly picked up on the transformative power of a closing celebration.  There are car dealers who will take your picture and have the whole sales team applaud when you pick up your brand new car.  Realtors give you a housewarming present at the closing.  A few high end barbers offer a short neck and shoulder massage after your hair cut.  You get the idea.  They are all going for that same positive capstone experience as high school graduation.

I wonder what it would do for our customer relations if we had a "graduation" after every customer interaction.

Legacies

The recent death of an acquaintance got me to thinking...
A year after your death, what will people remember about you personally and professionally?

They won't remember:

• the deadlines you made
• the budgets you balanced
• the meetings you ran
• the desk you kept clean (or failed to)

I suspect (hope) they will remember

• the help you provided someone just starting out
• the time you made a difference 
• the kind of relationship you have with your family and friends
• the kindness you show to people who you will never see again
• the crazy ideas that you championed
• the value you created for your coworkers and customers
• the values you instilled in your children 
• the smiles that you created, through a sense of humor or an act of kindness
• the art you create, whether it is musical art, visual art, performance art, or simply the art of being there

I fear that they will remember

• not the mistakes that you made but the way you reacted to those mistakes
• the times you lost your temper, especially if it is with a subordinate, or a customer
• intolerance
• injustices
• injuries (physical or emotional) that you inflicted
• The amount that you focused on (worried about) the legacy you are leaving vs. the life you are living.

Everyone will leave a mixed legacy.  The trick to leaving a legacy your grandchildren will be proud of, it seems to me, is to live like you care about others, about causes, and about doing good things, more than you care about your legacy.

Doorways

Your customer is standing in your doorway.  In 5 seconds or less they are making a subconscious decision on whether they are going to have a good experience or a bad one.

What are you doing in those 5 seconds to convince them it will be good?

Sunday afternoons

It is Sunday afternoon and my family is looking for something to do.

There are an amazing number of restaurants, shops, and other venues that are closed on Sundays.  I can't believe my family is the only one trying to find something to do and a bite to eat without going to a big box or a chain.

I recently asked a local retailer why they were closed on Sundays and Mondays like almost everyone else in the downtown of the small city where I live.  She told me she was closed then because everyone else was.

That seems to me like a good reason to be open on Sundays and Mondays!

"No!"

"No!" to any good salesman is the start of a conversation, not the end of it.

If you are a marketer or a communicator, someone saying "No!" should make you salivate a bit.  "No!" followed up with the question "Why?" can often help you better understand the thoughts and motivations of a prospective customer.

A person who says "No!" or who complains to you (vs. the person who never picks up the phone or answers the door) is doing you the favor of providing feedback.

And that should make you say "Yes!"

Frequency vs. consistency

A hundred years ago when I was in school taking marketing and advertising classes, Reach and Frequency was the mantra of the day.  In an era when mass media allowed you to reach everyone relatively cheaply, the way to get your message seen/heard/viewed and remembered was to make sure the message reached a broad audience and that the audience saw YOUR message frequently enough so that it would be remembered and, hopefully, acted upon.

With today's electronic media, and with some of recent and upcoming changes to the golden oldies of print, radio and TV, we can send customized messages to micro-targeted audiences inexpensively and efficiently.  Reach is still important, even though it now is a bit more nuanced.  I would argue, however, that frequency in less important these days.  Instead, the extreme targeting power of social and electronic media shifts the focus from frequency of message to consistency of message.

Old marketing messages no longer go into the recycling bin with the morning's newspaper.  They last forever on the internet.  What is almost more disconcerting is they can be found and read by your prospects with almost as much ease as they can find and read your current, intended message.  Because of this, I would argue that long-term consistency of message is as important, or more important, as frequency once was.

Reach and Consistency is the name of the new game!

Deja Vu

I feel like I have been here before.  Trying to decide whether to issue mea culpas about being absent for so long form this blog or just plow in and write something interesting and scintillating that will cause the one person who might still be reading this thing to pass it on to a friend, etc.

Perhaps it is the irony that the last blog I posted before a hiatus of almost a year and a half, was a blog on self-promotion.  Perhaps it is a feeling that I need to reconnect with my marketing roots...or my writing dreams...or both, by wrting this blog. 

Or maybe I actually have something to say.

I am going to make a commitment to writing very regularly in this blog.  I will not make a commitment that what I write will be particularly insightful, interesting or event comprehendable.  If you do stumble across this blog, please let me know what you think...or just that you stopped by to check it out.  Thanks by the way...

That is enough self-concious navel-gazing for now.

I will close with one simple message that I will continue to make...that point is that marketing DOES matter!  In virtually every situation.  This is not a profound statement

Talk to you soon...