Why?

Last Friday, I published my 200th post to this blog.  When I hit 100 posts last December, I vowed to myself, and publicly to all of you, that I would get the second hundred posts written and published within a year.  I kept my promise.

I get asked from time to time, why I spend the time and effort writing this blog.  I mostly get asked that question by my Dad.  "What do YOU get out of it," he asks when the topic comes up.

There are many reasons, all simple AND complicated, that I write this blog.  One of those reasons is that it gives me a chance to write.  On topics of my choosing.  In a format of my choosing.  According to a schedule of my choosing.  Have you noticed a pattern?

I also write this blog because it gets me reading all of those books and magazines I keep meaning to read.  I need to read to get ideas, keep current on marketing and communications issues and find good stories to share with you.  I need to read so that all of my blog rantings aren't based just on lessons I learned in college way back in the 70s and 80s.

I write this blog because it is one of the ways that I exercise that creative muscle that I talked about on Friday (see here).  Trying to write interesting, somewhat original blogs three times a week takes some time and practice.  But I find that the more I do it, the easier it is and the better I am.  At least that's what I tell myself!

I blog in the hope of finding an audience.  Nothing thrills me more than getting a comment from someone who wants to explore a point I made in a blog.  Nothing surprises me quite so much as when someone out of the blue makes such a comment.  Every writer wonders if there is an audience for what they scribble.  I occassionally get an indication that there is.

I write this blog because it is fun.  I enjoy writing and being able to tell stories and share ideas.  I enjoy working on ways to enhance the look and appeal of this blog.  I enjoy trying strategies to find new audiences.

But to me, probably the most important reason I write this blog is it is a way that I can give back. Perhaps it is the latent teacher in me, but I feel a need to share all of these life lessons learned and stories I've heard or read.  I feel driven to try to stimulate some thinking about marketing and communication, business and social responsibilty with whomever wanders by.

I feel drawn to teaching, and this is my classroom.

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Storytelling

All good marketing is essentially storytelling.

Marketing at its essence is connecting with people and since the beginning of time, one of the best ways to connect with others is through telling stories.  Whether you call them fables, tales, parables or pictographs, storytelling connects  us emotionally with what the speaker is saying.

Marketing is about sharing how you can solve a customer's problem.  Often, however, you need to convince the customer that you know what you are talking about.

Therefore, the following rules, originally tweeted by Emma Coats, Pixar’s Story Artist, have relevance, even if you aren't crafting the script for a major studio animated feature.  I would be interested to know what rule or rules resonates most with readers.  For me, number 2 is an important, and often challenging,  rule to keep in mind.

1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

Happy storytelling!

• Read More About The Story Spine: Pixar’s 4th Rule of Storytelling

A Coke By Any Other Name...

What we name things matters.  What we call things impacts our perceptions of them and our perceptions impact how we react or don't react to a product or a service.

Marketers typically spend a lot of time and resources on selecting an appropriate name for new product or service.  The marketing trash bin is full of good products that failed because they had a name that didn't connect with customers, or worse, had unintended connotations!

I wonder, for example, how much the famous flame-out of New Coke would have differed if the marketers in Atlanta had chosen a name that didn't remind everyone that the formula for their beloved Coca-Cola had been changed.  Would a wholly different name made New Coke a success?

Renaming happens a lot in politics.  Recently, Republicans realized it would be hard to drum up opposition to the new health care law if they used then formal name of The Affordable Care Act.  First of all, it is a boring So they dubbed the new law Obamacare.  This made it seem more like an ego-driven project of one man, not an affordable national health care program.

Sometimes, a rose by another name is just a thorn bush.

A Parable About Leadership

Leadership is a subject that seems to continually confound us.  A Bing search for "leadership books" generates 39 million results.  It seems to me that there are at least that many different perspectives about leadership and how to be a good leader out there.  

That is one of the reasons I like the story I am about to share with you.  I first read this story on Michael Josephson's excellent blog, "What Will Matter" and am reposting it here with his permission.  

Listening to politicians’ nasty rhetoric, one might think that leadership has to be aggressive and confrontational, but consider this parable about leadership.

A student assigned to write an essay about an effective leader wrote this story:

“I’ve been taking a bus to school for years. Most passengers keep to themselves and no one ever talks to anyone else.

“About a year ago, an elderly man got on the bus and said loudly to the driver, ‘Good morning!’ Most people looked up, annoyed, and the bus driver just grunted. The next day the man got on at the same stop and again he said loudly, ‘Good morning!’ to the driver. Another grunt. By the fifth day, the driver relented and greeted the man with a semi-cheerful ‘Good morning!’ The man announced, ‘My name is Benny,’ and asked the driver, ‘What’s yours?’ The driver said his name was Ralph.

“That was the first time any of us heard the driver’s name and soon people began to talk to each other and say hello to Ralph and Benny. Soon Benny extended his cheerful ‘Good morning!’ to the whole bus. Within a few days his ‘Good morning!’ was returned by a whole bunch of ‘Good mornings’ and the entire bus seemed to be friendlier. People got to know each other.

“If a leader is someone who makes something happen, Benny was our leader in friendliness.

“A month ago, Benny didn’t get on the bus and we haven’t seen him since. Everyone began to ask about Benny and lots of people said he may have died. No one knew what to do and the bus got awful quiet again.

“So last week, I started to act like Benny and say, ‘Good morning!’ to everyone and they cheered up again. I guess I’m the leader now. I hope Benny comes back to see what he started.”

I think that the student who wrote this essay hits the mark on so many levels about leadership.  Leadership is about attitude and perseverance much more than title or position.  Leadership is transformational.  Leadership can be transferred.

In my opinion, you don't need to buy any of the 39 million books on leadership.  All you need to do is read about Benny and the bus!

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Lessons Learned

It is easy to dismiss those that have gone before us.  They operated in a different world, when the rules were different/easier/not relevant.  The lessons they have to share, it often seems, do not apply to today’s world which has been turned on its head and inside out by the internet and the innovations it has wrought.  What relevance could the gray hairs have to today’s wired world?

So really, why bother?

The easy answer is to recite the quote "Those who ignore the past are destined to repeat it."  That, however, is not the point of this blog.  Rather, I think that the lessons learned are more subtle and much more valuable.  

Those that have gone before can share with us the lessons they have learned.  They can talk about the mistakes they have made, and the challenges they have overcome.  They can tell us where the skeletons are buried and which sacred cows to steer clear of.  Those that have gone before you have walked the same walk you are.  They have been there.  

Because, you see, things haven't really changed all that much.  Certainly there are new tools and new rules for how things get done.  Absolutely some processes and products and services have evolved and changed.  Definately things are different, in some aspects.

But people are still the same.  People still make decisions emotionally with pretty much the same motivations (acceptance, success, avoidance of pain) that they have for centuries.  Organizations, which are comprised of people, haven't changed how they operate that much.  Sure, they use email instead of messengers and LinkedIn to recruit candidates instead of a headhunter.  But at the end of the day, things run pretty much like they have for at least 50 or 60 years.  

Which means that old guy at work who can never figure out how to work the scanner, might just be able to teach you a thing or two if you take the time to listen.  

Face to Face

Try as we might, email and Skype will never replace all of our face to face interactions; webinars and conference calls will never be the same as sitting across a table from someone and solving the world’s problems; Facebook and LinkedIn will never take the place of grabbing dinner and drinks with friends.

Don’t get me wrong, conference calls and webinars serve a valuable purpose, but they don’t do a good job of establishing relationships, which is the basis for any successful business or marketing effort.  I have run successful events almost entirely by conference call, but I believe that worked because most of the people on the conference call already knew each other.  We had met many times in face to face meetings and networking opportunities and had worked together before.

What is it about face to face meetings that make them so powerful and important?  There are the obvious benefits.  You can read body language and facial expressions.  The fact that someone took the time to meet in person denotes a value to the meeting.

The real benefits of meeting in person are more subtle.  With apologies to all the online dating sites out there, I think it is nigh impossible to develop a solid relationship entirely online, regardless if the relationship is business-oriented, platonic or otherwise!  There are too many nuances and subtleties that are not a part of communications when you are separated by screens.   

I also think that promises and commitments made in person are more solid and harder to ignore than those made online.  This is especially true if you’ve only known the person online.

I think that there are wonderful tools out there that allow us to improve our productivity, increase our connections and talk to more people for much less investment (in time and resources).  I think these tools are most effective as supplements to existing relationships.  I also think that there will never be technology that truly takes the place of a face to face conversation. 

If only because it’s harder to share an appetizer that way!

The Life Cycle of a Mediocre Product

"You marketers," a friend of mine angrily said to me the other day, "need to give those of us that actually produce something a break!"

She was upset, but not really at me.  It turns out that a manager where she worked had made a comment that quality marketing (I'm sure he was referring to promotions) could take the place of quality product.  He indicated that the organization didn't need to put out a high quality (in his mind more expensive) product.  He suggested that they could still get customers with high quality promotions.  Customers, according to the erroneous manager, can't tell a good product from a bad one!

After I quickly explained to her that product WAS a part of marketing, I cautiously told my friend that the object of her scorn was right.  Marketing CAN generate sales with a poor product or service.  But only for one or two business cycles.

Often times, customers have no reasonable way to assess the quality of what they are buying until they buy it.  This is particularly true with services.  Usually, the customer who doesn't have past experience has to rely on word of mouth and the trustworthiness of the marketer.  If I am planning on hiring a neighbor kid to mow my lawn, unless she has mowed it before, or I have seen her work on other lawns, I have only her reputation to guide my decision.  After she has mowed my lawn once, I have a lot more information to inform future buying decisions.

I suggested to my friend that she only needed to wait out the object of her ire for a short while.  Mediocre products, after all, tend to have very short life cycles.  So do managers who eschew quality products.

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Do you have an Oak Marketing Strategy?

Last weekend, my daughter and I were discussing the trees in our backyard.  Specifically we were discussing what to do about a Burr Oak that we planted several years ago and a Maple that had grown nearby. I was touting the benefits of the Maple, because it had gotten so tall, so fast.  My daughter called it a "weed tree" and complained that it was crowding out the Burr Oak, keeping it from getting the sunlight and water it needed.

Burr Oak tree, West Dundee, IL.
Diameter: 49.7". Estimated age: 300+ years.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It struck me that the debate we were having was a good metaphor for the debate marketers have all the time between short term promotional campaigns and brand building; between short term and long term marketing.

Just like the trees in our back yard, short term marketing has the potential to crowd out long term marketing and brand building.  Opportunistic one-shot advertising and promotional campaigns have their place.  They can be very effective and useful...in the short term.  Like the maple tree, they are nice to look at and it is easy to see their benefits.  But if those campaigns aren't managed, and carefully used within the framework of a larger, long term marketing strategy, you run the risk of using all your resources, all your sunlight and water, on something that grows fast and then is gone.

For those of you who don't have an arborist nearby, let me explain. Burr Oaks are slow growing and long lasting trees.  Burr Oaks can live to be 300 to 400 years old.  That means there are Burr Oaks around that could have provided shade for a young Benjamin Franklin.  Maple trees grow fast and last an average of 75 to 100 years.

Like the Burr Oak, a strategic marketing plan provides long-lasting benefits.  It takes a long time and a lot of patience to build a lasting brand image.  But if you give it the resources it needs, and manage the other activities competing for those resources, your time and efforts will be rewarded with something truly special. You develop something long-lasting and awe inspiring.

You develop an Oak Marketing Strategy.

Cheers for Cheerios

From time to time an advertiser does something in an ad that grabs an undue amount of attention. Sometimes it is positive attention.  More often it is negative.

Recently, General Mills ran a Cheerios ad designed to promote the heart healthy properties of the cereal. You can watch the ad here.  Because they chose to make the family in the ad a mixed race family, it has drawn some attention and criticism that has nothing to do with the message of the commercial.  

To their credit, General Mills did not pull the commercial, although they were forced to take down comments about the commercial on YouTube because of the nature and intensity of some of the negative comments.

Typically, this type of thing gets me depressed.  But there is a video put out by Benny and Rafi Fine that changed that.  The video, found at the bottom of this post, shows the reaction of several young children, aged 6 to 13, to the commercial and to the controversy surrounding it.  The video below will gave me hope in the up and coming generation.  The video below made me realize that the people who brought down comments for an ad on YouTube are the immature ones.  The video below helped me realize that so many of the social/political issues we have been struggling with for decades will no longer be an issue once this generation, and the nation, grows up!

Mostly, the video below will make me realize just how smart Cheerios was to keep the ad up and running!

Bad, Fast Emails

One of the primary wonders of the internet is the speed with which it can disseminate information.  Information, unfiltered and unadulterated, can speed around the world at the speed of a tweet.

This is powerful and wonderful and awe inspiring when it works to share word about a political movement, a scientific discovery or the birth of a prince.

But, when someone makes a mistake on your email address in a distribution list, it can speed around the world almost as fast as word of the latest celebrity arrest.  It can take longer to get things worked out than the endless stories about the celebrity's paroles and rearrests.

Similarly, if a mistake is made in a newsfeed or newspaper, that mistake will be picked up and circle the globe a couple of times before you burn your tongue on your morning coffee.

Now, more than ever, accuracy is important.  It is so easy to fix errors in a document, factual accuracy might not seem that important.  It is not primary document accuracy that is so important but what I like to call the echo document accuracy.   Errors carried by echo documents have the greater impact.  Echo documents are all the reposts and retweets that a primary document creates.  Once echo documents start bouncing around, it is very difficult to contain them.

Now, more than ever, it is important to contain and correct mistakes as quickly as possible.  Nothing is as fast as a bad email!

Ready, Shoot, Aim

In this era of Twitter and Instagram, there is considerable pressure on companies and brands to be timely and topical and try to grab their share of the viral madness of a given issue.  In this era of citizen journalists and a smart phone in many pockets, companies and brands are compelled to try to be the first out of the gate with a comment about a topic.  It is a Ready, Shoot, Aim culture.

The truth is, however, many companies end up doing much more harm then good to their brands  when they display their clumsiness or cultural insensitivity through a poorly written or ill-timed tweet or post.  The chances of this happening go up exponentially when a company is focusing more on timeliness (we want to be the first to comment on this) than appropriateness.

Occasionally a company hits a home run.  Ironically, a perfect example of a company hitting a home run is the tweet that Oreo sent during last year's Super Bowl.  When the power went out and most of us were growing weary of listening to the announcers try to fill an unexpected long period of time, the marketing team for Oreo was working hard and effectively.  They came up with a simple, brilliant, topical tweet.  You can see that tweet here and at the end of this blog.  It was funny.  It was inoffensive.  It filled the time while millions of people were waiting for the Super Bowl to start again.  It got retweeted over and over again.  It went viral.  Opportunities like the Super Bowl power outage are rare. Companies being ready to take advantage of those rare opportunities are even rarer.  Oreo was the company that took the best advantage of that opportunity.  They are still enjoying the benefits, as people like me continue to talk about it and share the tweet.

But it is not easy to do this.  Many companies, trying to be quick-witted or topical or edgy, end up sounding tone deaf, insensitive and just plain nasty.  Take for example, the ads for Blush Lingerie connecting their underwear to Edward Snowden uncovering things.  You can find these slightly NSFW ads here.  The ads are not that funny and somewhat tone deaf.

It also seems as if some marketers can't resist joining in on a world event that is garnering lots of attention.  For example, consider the tweet by Kennith Cole, a clothing designer of some renown, who tweeted ""Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC"  His next tweet, 2 hours later, was an apology about making light of a "serious situation."

Every marketer dreams of doing what Oreo did in the Super Bowl.  To a marketer, it is like hitting a walk off home run in the World Series.  But (as I totally overuse this sports analogy) every home run hitter says you strike out a lot before you hit a home run.  The trick is to make sure your strike outs don't do serious damage to your brand.  The trick is to make sure your misses are simply misses and not culturally or socially insensitive to the point of being all people remember about your brand.  The trick is to tie your brand to an event that is easier to make jokes about, like the Super Bowl, rather than one in which people are killed and maimed, like Arab Spring or the Boston bombing.

Finally, and I think most important, it is more important when using social media to tie your brand to current events to take a bit of extra time to get your message right.  No one is talking about who had the first advertising tweet tied to the Super Bowl power outage.  Rather, they are talking about the brand who got everything right.  The brand who took the time to aim before they shot!

An Organization of Note...and HBD to Me

From time to time in my blog I like to highlight organizations that are worthy of a bit of attention.  These will be organizations that help to embody some of the marketing and communications concepts I often write about.  They are organizations that, whether by design or happy accident, are sharing their short, simple message in a clear and effective way.  Put another way, they are organizations that are working.

One group that seems to do a good job of that is the International Crane Foundation.  The International Crane Foundation (ICF) works worldwide to conserve cranes and their wetland habitats.  One of the things that makes ICF unique is the depth of completeness of their particular focus.  The mission statement is: "The International Crane Foundation (ICF) works worldwide to conserve cranes and the ecosystems, watersheds and flyways on which they depend.  ICF is dedicated to providing experience, knowledge, and inspiration to involve people in resolving threats to these ecosystems."

Simply put, ICF does anything and everything it can to preserve the 15 species of cranes worldwide.  This means working to save and protect their habitat.  Developing and supporting breeding programs.  Educating students and adults about the beauty of cranes and threats to their survival.

One of the ways ICF's unique focus manifests itself is through their 225-acre Baraboo, Wisconsin main campus.   At Baraboo, among other things, they maintain a captive flock of approximately 100 cranes on   This flock includes the only complete collection of all 15 crane species anywhere in the world.  I took the photos in this blog at ICF's headquarters.

When ICF sends out emails, they are full of news and links to things like the Crane Cam where you can watch nesting pairs when they have eggs in their nest.

The International Crane Foundation has a simple focus which leads to a lot of not so simple work.  If you are interested in finding out more about cranes and ICF's work to save and preserve them, you can find them at www.savingcranes.org.  

I hope you find the organization as impressive as I do!

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Birthday Cake
(Photo credit: Will Clayton)

Today, July 24th, I celebrate the successful completion of another trip around the sun.  I would love to share a slice of cake with all of you, but am afraid you'll have to settle for a byte...(sorry...I couldn't help myself!)

Also, in lieu of the presents and cards I know you were in the process of sending, I would like to ask a small favor.  If you enjoy reading this blog, please consider subscribing by email.  The link to do so is at the top of the column on the right.  If you do, I will try to return the favor by occasionally writing something interesting, informative or mildly humorous.  I won't send you money Thank you!

A Numbers Game

It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the quantity of data that is increasingly available to organizational and marketing leaders.  It is very easy to find yourself wanting to retreat to a analytic fetal position and ignore the data.

But the reality is that we value what we measure. Similarly, we should measure what we value.  There is a nuance between those statements.

The very act of collecting data on something, imparts value on it.  When my wife and I bought a new hybrid car 10 years ago, one of the things that we were fascinated by was the dashboard graphic that showed us our gas mileage at that instant.  We quickly learned how different ways of driving impacted that all important MPG number.  Our fuel efficiency was important to us in concept prior to that, which is why we bought a hybrid.  But with the graphic in front of us it became much less of an ethereal concept and much more of a focus every time we got behind the wheel.

Similarly, a long time ago, when I worked in an advertising agency, we collected the column inches of newspaper articles that appeared about our clients.  Because we were collecting that data and sharing it internally, it was a frequent topic of conversation.  Eventually, we recognized that as an advertising agency, not a PR firm, we really didn't impact our client's newspaper mentions.  We realized that we were collecting newspaper mentions "because we could," not because it was important.  We discontinued it and the topic of column inches was never discussed again.

With so much of our marketing and communication lives happening online, data collection is no longer the issues it once was. There are metrics galore available to any marketer or communicator who wants them.  The challenge for marketers has shifted from trying to figure out what information to gather to trying to figure out what, of the plentiful data available, is useful data.

Whereas before, marketers measured "what they could," now to a greater extent they can analyze what they should.  It seems to me that easily available data still has that allure of importance.  Like with column inches at the ad agency I worked for, marketers need to be careful about chasing after measures such as Facebook likes or Klout scores simply because they are available.

Just as social media options should be a tool in your marketing toolbox, not your marketing strategy, available metrics should help you measure whats important, not a measure of what is important.

Volunteers as Starting Points

Abraham Lincoln said that if he could get someone to lend him a book, they would be a friend for life.  The act of lending something as valuable as a book was an act of engagement and trust.  After that, it was impossible to be indifferent and indifference is a bigger threat to friendship than animosity.

The same thing is true about volunteerism.  If you can get someone to voluntarily do something in support of your organization or brand, even something small, you have the start of engagement.  Once you have engagement, you have awareness and involvement and all sorts of good things can happen.

I suspect that this is the thinking behinds the marketing campaigns that are abundant right now that encourage readers or viewers to "like" or "retweet" or "pin" the latest page, site, or post of the company.

The trouble is that often the marketing plans don't go beyond the request for the original interaction.  Lincoln didn't change enemies into friends simply by borrowing books.  He used that initial act as an excuse to engage in conversation, debate an issue or lend back a related book.

Similarly, just getting someone to like your Facebook page does little to no true marketing good.  Getting someone who had liked your Facebook page to them sign up for an e-newsletter or to request a coupon for a free sample of what you are selling is a step in the right direction.  The point is it is easier to get people who have taken a tiny bit of time to like you on Facebook to take a tiny bit more time to sign up for something or watch a video. The general public who haven't volunteered their tiny bit of time, haven't made that tiny commitment to you.

Now that you've voluntarily read this blog, please subscribe!

A Strong, Simple Message

One of the most effective strategies for cutting through the message clutter is to have consistency of message.  Convincing non-marketing leaders of the need for consistency of message can be one of the hardest things to do as a marketer.

To be effective your message must be clear, concise and repeated frequently. In a mass media strategy, that means replaying the same ad on the same media over and over and over again. In a new media strategy, while message repetition has a place, message consistency becomes more important. Your message will be displayed differently and probably less frequently on different media. Done well, it could be MANY different media.  So if someone sees your message on a banner ad, a magazine ad, a retweet, in a radio story and on your blog, there had better be the same message elements running through each of those, or you have lost out on a golden opportunity to drive home your key message.

One of the scariest things about social media for most marketers is loss of control of the message.  The conversation of social media is much more difficult to manage than the monologues of mass media.  One of the exciting things about social media for most marketers is that you can interact and engage customers and potential customers directly.

There are some things you can do to help make sure your message is heard:

• Select a strong, simple message and use it consistently and constantly in everything you do.  
• Make sure your message is heard and understood and used by all internal audiences because internal audiences carry your message out into social media.  Make sure they are carrying the message you want them to!
• Make sure your strong, simple message is translated effectively into tweets and posts and blogs, so that wherever and however a prospect or customer is interacting with you, she is getting that same strong, simple message.  This can mean changes in length of message, language of message and format of message.  It should not mean a change of the core theme of the message.
• Use that strong, simple message over and over and over again.  About the time you are getting so sick and tired of that strong, simple message that you can't stand seeing it anymore is about the time that your audiences are starting to notice it.  Continue to use it.  Fight with your boss and your bosses boss when they insist on a new message.  They will be glad that you did in the long run!
• Resist the urge to complicate things with additional messages, sub messages, tangential messages or anything like that.  Companies that have been most successful in marketing and messaging in both traditional AND social media have presented a strong, simple message and stuck with it.
• Make sure your message means something to the audiences that matter to you.  If your strong, simple message is in jargon or uses terminology that is unknown or unfamiliar to your audiences, it is NOT a strong, simple message to that audience.
• I do want to be clear.  A strong, simple message is not necessarily a simplistic message.  "Acme Industries is good" does not qualify as a strong message.  Your message should identify your organization.  It should emphasize or highlight some reason prospective customers should consider becoming customers. This means it should emphasize or highlight a solution to a problem commonly shared by prospects.

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• The Devolution Of Social Media Marketing

Too much of a good thing

I made a mistake a while back.  I contributed to a political party.  The reason that was a mistake is now they will not stop calling me.   On a recent weekend (not during an election mind you), I got four calls asking for donations.  I have asked to be taken off of their call list.

(Photo credit: :: Wendy ::)

In a similar mistake, I signed up for something online that is supposed to support my high school alma mater. Very soon I was getting emails every day trying to sell me something.  I have stopped even looking at those emails.  They now get deleted as soon as they show up in my inbox.  I haven't yet taken myself off of the distribution list out of some sort of alumni guilt.  That is probably going to change soon.

With the cost of reaching out to customers and prospective customers falling to almost nothing, it is more important than ever that companies and organizations remember who bears the greatest cost every time they reach out to a contact.  The contact does.

Even with permission marketing, you can reach out too much.  Even with those who are already your fans or supporters or customers, if you call four times in one weekend, you are going to annoy them.

Organizations need to understand that there is a cost of time and attention every time they call or email someone.  They need to be sensitive to the fact that both time and attention are in short supply for most people.  IF they are going to contact you frequently, they should provide you something of value with that contact.  IF they are going to contact you frequently, they should recognize that it is easy to cross the line into annoyance and get put on the don't call list.

In the best of situations, organizations create reasons for their customers and supporters to reach out to them!  It's hard to overdo it when you have your customers contacting you!

Buddha Knows Customer Service

I came across a post on Facebook the other night that gave the 5 steps to happiness:

1. Smile more.
2. Think less.
3. Be present.
4. Give more.
5. Expect less.

The watermark on the photo indicated it was from a source called Buddha Heart.

I started thinking that while these were excellent steps for general happiness, they were also a nice, succinct guide to providing excellent customer service!

Smile more.

You cannot go wrong if you are genuinely smiling, whether you are answering the phone or talking to a customer.  A smile shows you are happy to be interacting with the customer.  That goes a long way to helping address customer needs and addressing problems when they arise.

Think less.

I think sometimes we are our own worst enemies when addressing a customer.  If we are busy analyzing "what she really meant" or "how can I get out of this situation" we are not focusing on the person and the issue in front of us.  If you ask many professional athletes, who are in the middle of a slump, what is wrong, many of them will say that they are thinking too much.  Like professional athletes, employees should develop the muscle memory to provide excellent customer service by instinct.  Without thinking.

Be Present.

A lot of excellent customer service involves problem resolution.  In order to help a customer resolve her problem, however, you must be present in the situation, you must own the problem as your own and you must take responsibility for ensuring that the customer leaves satisfied, or at least satisfied that you are trying to help her.  Customer service, and especially problem resolution, cannot be effectively put off until later.

Give More.
Customer service is all about giving.  Giving of attention , giving of status (you have my attention because you are important to me and to the organization) and giving of authority (the customer is always right.)   It is extremely difficult to give too much customer service.

Expect Less.
You cannot do excellent customer service with any payback in mind.  Customers should be able to expect good service.  Customers who have a problem will cease to exist as customers if they don't get some timely attention to their concerns.  At a restaurant, an excellent server does a ton of little things that you might not even notice to help make your dining experience special.  An excellent server is doing that because she wants to do an excellent job and help you have a special experience, not specifically with a tip in mind.

Buddha knows customer service!

Frozen Twinkies

Twinkies (Hostess Twinkies is a trademark of Hostess Brands LLC). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Before last winter, the most prevailing story, or urban myth, about Twinkies was the one about the guy who found a 20 year old Twinkie behind his couch and it was still soft and consumable.

Twinkies were right alongside cockroaches as the things most likely to weather a nuclear holocaust unscathed.

Then last winter disaster struck. Hostess, the company that made and sold Twinkies filed for bankruptcy.  More importantly, they announced the end of the United States production and distribution of Twinkies and several other brands.

Suddenly, Twinkies were the most popular formerly ignored snack on store shelves.  People stocked up with  cases and cases of the cream-filled sponge cake treats, anticipating a healthy black market of contraband snack cakes.  Besides, they last forever, right?

Then the white knight arrived.  Investors came and bought the Twinkies brand, as well as those of several other snack cakes, with the intention of returning them to production.

There was joy in Snackville...except among those who were sitting on cases of Twinkies.

Then strange things started to happen.  Hostess Brands LLC, the new owner of Twinkies, started issuing press releases that included terms like shelf life and talked about selling frozen Twinkies to some retailers to help extend expiration dates.  This was very confusing and contradicted just about everything I "knew" about Twinkies and their lack of a need for an expiration date.

I have come to the conclusion that the masterminds behind Hostess Brands LLC are actually marketing geniuses.  First, they manage to "rescue" a suddenly beloved brand from the expiration bin at fire sale prices, waiting long enough that a frenzy had been built up about the brand that hadn't been seen since the likes of New Coke.

Then, they wait six months to bring back the lunch box delicacies, further tamping up demand.  Then, announcements about the reintroduction include talk of expiration dates and freezing for selective retailers.  Suddenly, we are comparing Twinkies to more delicate baked goods instead of cockroaches.

Well played, Hostess Brands!  Well played!

They Just Don't Care About Apathy

I know many fine people that I greatly respect who work for the United States Post Office.  I marvel regularly at what they are able to do for the cost of one little stamp.  I sincerely hope that the Post Office will prove all the demise-predicting pundits wrong because I think it is an important institution for our society.

If the US Post Office ceases to exist in the next 10 years, it is my opinion its demise will not be brought about by Saturday deliveries or federal oversight that requires onerous pension payments and restricts its ability to compete with private firms.  It will not be brought about by budget shortfalls or cost overruns.

Rather, the US Post Office will be brought down by the most insidious problem an organization ever has to deal with.  Apathy.

I find myself frequently dealing with mailings of between several hundred and a couple thousand pieces.  This is the type of mailing that is often too small to send out to a full service printer but too large to be done internally without a fair amount of effort and time.  One of my practices, in order to streamline things as much as possible, has been to take a prototype of the mailing to the Post Office to make sure that there won't be any problems.

The problem has been that for almost 50% of the mailings I have done over the last few years, what I am told when I take in the prototype and what I am told when I bring in what I thought was a final mailing is different.  Sometimes VERY different.  It often results in a significant delay in my mailing and a loathsome amount of rework.  Just recently, I brought a mailing in to get the cost of postage.  I was told one amount by the clerk behind the counter.  The next day, I brought in the mailing stamped and ready to mail and was told by the same guy that I had the wrong amount of postage on the mailing.  The same guy.  One day later.

I understand that everyone makes mistakes.  It is a part of being human.

I also understand that one of any organization's best chances to provide excellent customers service that is remembered by a customer is when a mistake has been made.  When a mistake has been made and identified, how your organization responds will have a huge impact on whether the customer walks away for good or not.

How your organization steps up to or runs away from problems has almost everything to do with whether the customer experiencing the problem feels that they are important to you, that you care about them as an individual customer, or whether they are "just a sale."  How much customers feel respected by the offending organization has a direct correlation on positive or negative word of mouth, active antagonism or even law suits.

When I told the Post Office employee that he had told me a significantly different postage rate just they day before, that I had asked him twice if he was sure because I "didn't want to have to do this a second time" and showed him where he had written the wrong amount down for me, he just said "sorry."  When I asked him and the other clerk who was present at the time what my options were, they just shrugged their shoulders with a slight smirk on their faces.  It was obviously not their problem.  They were apathetic to my issue.

I know that the Post Office, as a pseudo-governmental agency, might have limited options.  I know that they weren't going to be able to let me mail my mailings with insufficient postage.  But I also know that neither of the clerks who were confronted with this issue took this on as their concern.  I know that neither of the people I was dealing with cared if they had cost me a weeks worth of work and significant amount of money and a deadline I was pushing to make.  

Perhaps the Post Office can afford apathy.  No one else at the moment can send a letter across the country for 46 cents (except email which can do it for free.)   No one else can deliver bills and magazines and personal messages right to your mailbox for pennies (except for the internet which delivers it to your computer, in the house, for free.)

Perhaps the Post Office can afford apathy but no one else can.  Including their customers and former customers! 

Please let me know of experiences you have had with excellent, and not so excellent, customer service in the comments below!  Thanks!

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Republished: The 5th of July

A Fourth of July fireworks display at the Washington Monument. Location: WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (DC) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

July 5, 2013

Yesterday was the 4th of July.  The 4th of July is a special day in the United States for many reasons.  It is the birthday of our country and a celebration of our nationalism. It is a holiday of summer, sitting as it does smack dab in the middle between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the traditional bookends of summer.  It is a holiday of contradictions, with military parades and fireworks as well as beer and carnivals.  For example, this year in celebration of the 4th, I had a deep fried peanut butter & jelly sandwich and went to a wonderful symphony orchestra concert...at the same venue!  For the record, the symphony orchestra was better!

The best thing about this holiday though, is that everyone is patriotic, at least for the day.  For at least one day of the year, we all stand shoulder to shoulder and boldly proclaim our love for our country.  It makes me wish, sometimes, that we could bottle a bit of that national pride for the other 364 days of the year.

Anytime an organization hosts an event or a celebration, one of their goals is usually that participants still look fondly on it the next day.  In many ways, the success of the celebration is based on how it is remembered the next day.

With that in mind, I wish you a very happy 5th of July!