Aug 27, 2013 | Communication, Lean, Marketing, Social Media
Lean thinking is well established in manufacturing and office operations, but social media?
Hardly?
Lean thinking is all about the removal of anything that does not add value to the customer. So, if we extend this a bit to potential customers as well, given that Social media is now being extensively used in marketing programs, and ask ourselves weather that post, tweet, or message of some sort is adding value, or just clogging up the recipients feed.
For most of us, time is our most valuable resource. Therefore, it should be incumbent on us as responsible marketers, setting out to gain the interest, and trust of customers, not to waste their time with trivia, irrelevance, and what amounts to directed SPAM.
Most people reading this blog are still working out their menu of Social media usage. Each platform has differing characteristics of usage and ecosystem of users, and like most software, most users leverage a small percentage of the capability. Once you spend a bit of time and recognise which platform suits the way you want to interact, be ruthless about removing the “waste” by saying goodbye to those that are not worth the investment of your time.
However, the advent of automated marketing is adding another dimension. Once a marketer has your email address and christian name, it can be hard to recognise a robot from a real person, and often the “Unsubscribe” button is hard to find.
Not a good way to engage a potential customer.
We should be asking ourselves a few questions before we send out anything:
- How does this communication add to the sum of knowledge “recipient” has?
- What value is that knowledge to “recipient” , or are we just filling a quota?
- Where is the humanity of the message communicated?
Tough questions, which will both increase the response rate, because to answer them takes time, research, and sensitivity, and annoy less recipients, simply because the message will add value by addressing their needs.
Jul 31, 2013 | Communication, Social Media
“We just clicked”
It’s an old expression to describe the situation where you meet someone, and find a lot to talk about, mutual interests, and an immediate comfort in each others company for some reason.
In the digital world, it means something entirely different, implying a “friending” of someone on a social site, or a “click-through” on an e-vertisement or link on a site.
The key difference is the presence or otherwise of a real person, not an avatar, not a site, or a blog, a real person, whose hand you can shake, eyes you can smile into.
The value of a real relationship, one with a person, should never be confused with the number of “friends” on a social media site.
Humans are social animals, and while we might call this thing taking over our lives “Social media” it perhaps could be better called “Anti-Social media”
Jul 3, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Sales
Price is always a sticky subject.
In most cases, sales people have been trained to slide over answering the inevitable, and often first question about price, until the value of the sales proposition has been established with the potential buyer.
That is the way it was.
Now, we all seek information on specification, availability, options and list price using the net, all information that in an earlier time, the salesperson could dole out as the sales process evolved. Therefore the decision is often almost made before a salesman has the opportunity to become engaged in the process.
When your sales prospect types “Widget prices” into Google, because that is their last question, the top 10 results, which is all most of us look at, are the ones that have “widgets from $100” or “Worlds cheapest widgets” in the headline.
You have just lost control of the conversation if you are not there.
Web sites are different to face to face, the emotion, the human interaction and the potential that humanity brings to the process has been removed, and you need to replace it with something that creates the opportunity for a conversation.
If you are on the web to sell, and the product is such that potential customers will ask the price early in the game, don’t be afraid, be proud, and put your pricing up front, along with your value proposition, so at least you might get a chance to talk about it.
Jun 19, 2013 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
Marketers have a whole range of new tools to use to tap the opportunities emerging from the digital age, but most appear to approach the challenge in an ad hoc manner.
It seems to me that there are 4 trends that are driving marketing behavior:
- The shift from offline marketing to digital. Whilst this is generally seems as a “catch all trend” it is really just a part of the marketing strategy mix that needs to be considered on its own merits. In this situation, how should I use TV Vs YouTube or facebook, what is the best mix of media to achieve a outcome?.
- The shift from paid to earned media. This can easily be seen as a subset of the first point, and from a marketing resource perspective it is, but from a consumer perspective, it is entirely different. The sudden availability of a digital version of word of mouth endorsement has changed the dynamics, consumers put far more faith in earned than purchased messages. It is also a bit more complex than that, as consumers no longer consume advertising, in any medium, they watch what interests them. If an ad is interesting, irrespective of the medium, it will get watched, and you have only a moment to gain the interest before you get deleted.
- The increasing importance of data in marketing. In the “old days” the best that you could do was measure theoretical impacts on an audience, about as inexact as throwing a stone at a bird flying past. That has changed, we can now measure with great accuracy a host of data that reveals preferences and behavior that have nothing to do with the generalities of the past.
- Fragmentation of just about everything, and because there is just so much data, it tends to be siloed, or ignored. Therein lies the huge marketing opportunity of the future, those who can cut across the silos, and extract the actionable insights will own the markets. Automation is taking over (perhaps has taken over) with the integration of CRM with social media and automated marketing programming that is occurring online.
It is in the fourth trend that lies the secret sauce. Finding ways to increase the productivity of the marketing investment you make, not just in the expenditure to reach the marketplace, and achieve an outcome, but in the overhead costs of running an effective marketing function.
Jun 4, 2013 | Branding, Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Social Media
Hugh MacLeod
There are many people I would like to meet, but a special group of them are the thinkers in the “new media” space.
Brian Solis is one of them, along with Clay Shirky, Hugh McLeod, Mitch Joel, and Seth Godin. These are all people who are shaping the manner in which we perceive the explosion of connectability that is driving our lives, enterprises, and the world we live in.
A current report of the Altimeter group of which Brian is a principal is called “The evolution of Social Business: Six stages of business transformation”. The report, and embedded slideshare presentation puts a framework around the bumbling most organisations are experiencing as they grapple with the opportunities, complications and costs of social, and socialised media.
Two last guests. First, someone who does a fantastic job of curating the content and thinking that is going on, is generous enough to share it all, and who knows all of the above blokes in person as a result of that generosity, Mike Stelzner. Second, an Aussie bird, for a bit of balance to the testosterone, and an alternative way of looking at things, Bernadette Jiwa.
What a truly great dinner group, the conversation would redefine “out of the box”, what pity I suck as a cook.
Jun 3, 2013 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Amongst the most common questions I get is “how do we make it viral?”
In the minds of most, “Viral” amounts to “Free” and it may be, but it costs to get there, even if the costs are often less obvious than an invoice from an ad agency.
Word of Mouth has always been the most effective form of advertising, and it still is. An endorsement from a friend or known expert, is marketing Gold. However, in the “old days” of word of mouth, you never heard what Mrs Jones said to Mrs Brown over the back fence, you just hoped you had done enough that it would be an endorsement rather than a panning, but on an individual basis, it really did not matter, so long as the balance was right.
No longer.
Word of mouth has changed into word of mouse, and the while the upside is seductive, the downside is the loss of control, and the immediacy of the impact.
You simply cannot control what is said, or the outcome of the saying, all you can do is respond, and the quicker the better, and with a healthy dose of common sense, a rare commodity it often seems.
