Jul 16, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Small business, Social Media
A vast array of marketing & sales activity is aimed at persuading, far less are aimed at engaging. This may appear to be a largely semantic difference, but consider the difference when you see someone undertaking an activity they are paid to do, compared to somebody undertaking the same activity because they love to do it.
Yet it is engagement that leads to persuasion, not the other way around, so why bother trying to persuade, which is usually a recitation of the features of your product or service, concentrate on engagement and have the product sell itself.
Jul 12, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Her we go again, another paradigm shift (cliché warning) in media.
The basis of the advertising business has always been cost per impression. Doesn’t matter about the medium, that is how the costs have been calculated, however, there is a pretty clear recognition that beyond low cost commodity items, cost is not the way we make decisions, they are made on the basis of perceived value. Therefore there seems to be a disjoint between what we recognise as the foundation of selling, and the manner in which we make most purchase decisions.
The emergence of social media is all about the opportunity to build connections and relationships, with people, brands, locations, groups, you name it, all there, so why would a banner ad work in that environment?.
Sooner or later, Social Media platforms will realise that their future is in finding ways to monetarise the opportunity for a relationship provided by access to the interactions of their users.
Facebook, the great IPO failure of the year, is in a prime position, being the place everyone goes, so the current stock price may be cheap if they figure out how to sell the value of the opportunity to engage in a conversation, rather than the charge for the opportunity to interrupt it.
Jun 29, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
During times of stress, when there is too much to do and too little time to do it, we find ways to sort the tasks into categories to better manage our time.
In medical terms, Triage. Treat now, can wait till later, no hope so time is better spent elsewhere.
Running through my favorites list, and the email subscriptions I take, I realised I had done a similar thing with my social media options.
Some email subscriptions get opened every time, others sometimes depending on the headline
Some in the favorites list get looked at weekly, others once in a while, others I had not looked at for ages, so they just got deleted.
There is a hierarchy at work here based on my experience with these sites and my evolving interests, and weather we know it or not, we all do it.
The task therefore for the blogger, is to be on the first tier of the social media triage with as many readers as possible, and to do that, we need to be engaging to a pretty specific group of readers. Those that fall into the second and third groups are far less relevant.
This is not a numbers game, it is a relevance game.
Jun 20, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
The oldest market research technique in the world is to ask a group “imagine brand X is walking through the door, tell me about him/her”. This enables respondents to describe the brand with human terms, words that reflect the human characteristics to which we all relate, and understand.
Why is it then that we do not think about our brands presence in social media as the Social Life of the brand?
Wander around the net, Twitter, Google+, 4 square, YouTube, Pinterest, and all the rest, and you find a few sensible, brand relevant comments and posts amongst the inane updates and dross. It is understandable that brand owners want to appear human, so they often talk drivel on the social media, as this is what happens in life, but if the brand is worth anything, it will opt out of the rubbish and be relevant.
Think about it as a social gathering. When you meet someone who talks rubbish, you cannot wait to get away, by contrast meet someone who has something interesting to say, and you stick around.
Jun 19, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Personal Rant, Strategy
The current Australian government has a marketing problem.
Their other problems, trouble with the hung parliament, zealous credit card expenditure by MP’s, inability to out-communicate the drivel of the opposition, a rebellious electorate, a failed “moral Imperative” and others, are just the symptoms.
Every useful marketer knows that success depends on a relentless focus on clearly articulated longer term goals. When focus is allowed to shift to the crisis of the day, from the “main-game”, whatever that may be in your circumstances, to responding to the day to day, the marketing effort fragments and stumbles for lack of a solid foundation.
The problem with this Government, and the Opposition as well, is a lack of any long term goal the electorate understands beyond their selfish objective of retaining/gaining power, and if the electorate cannot buy into the government of the day’s priorities for various reasons, they at least understand the “why”, as a process of explanation has occurred.
Generally the pundits say the Government has a communication problem, but it is much deeper than that, they have no idea of what it is they wish to communicate beyond the press release of the day that they hope will dose the fire started yesterday. They have a fundamental strategic marketing problem, not just a communication problem.
Jun 14, 2012 | Communication, Personal Rant, Social Media
Last week I was talking to a headhunter seeking to fill a senior contract management role for which I had been recommended. I had polished up the resume and sent it as requested, and he had browsed my blog and Linkedin profile, but the conversation was awkward, filling in and rehashing the detail of my long career to the exclusion of the bigger view.
Towards the end, I simply asked him what he was looking for, and the answer surprised. His response was “virtually everyone I see who I have not met before substantially embellishes if not outright lies on their resume, I am looking for the inconsistencies”.
What a conversation stopper!.
All I could say was “what you see is what you get”. No lies, no embellishments, no credit taken personally for successes of the teams I have led, no walking away from the blunders, no lipstick on the pig.
