“We must be on Facebook”.

This is a pretty common call amongst the junior marketing staff of my clients, most of them are familiar with facebook, they use it in their personal lives to fill a whole range of functions.

When asked “Why must we be on Facebook”? there is usually an awkward silence, and the standard response is likely to be something like  “just because!”

Facebook, Twitter, and all the others are just tools, they are able to deliver an outcome, but it is the outcome that matters, not the tool, used to get there.

You measure the performance of a car on a journey in many ways, petrol mileage, comfort,  handling, and so on, but the reason you get in the car is to get somewhere. Social media is no different, measures of the media themselves are just measures of efficiency, not measures of the outcome.

To make it worthwhile, to create engagement, to build a relationship, there must be something for the traveler at the end of the journey.

Your “elevator pitch”

If you cannot state your mission in a very few words, perhaps less than 10, able to be expressed in 30 seconds, the time it takes for a ride in an elevator to the 30th floor, where the big boys live, try again.

I see many mission and purpose statements that are full of jargon and weasel words, that really convey little but the perceived need to make everybody happy, to conform to the latest fad management book, but by the time it gets to the factory floor, where it really matters, it means nothing.

To be effective, a mission statement should be a reflection of what all those in the business feel, what needs to be built, the answer to the question, “what are we doing here?”

So it is easy to wordsmith a statement, but it takes persistence, leadership, and determination to make any use of it.

Talk is cheap

We are pretty well immune to those who make promises, as we have heard it all before, and having been burnt, and burnt, we tend not to believe the hype this time.

Doesn’t matter if it is a colleague assuring us they will meet a deadline, a supplier “guaranteeing” performance of his offering, or a pollie telling us the train line will be built by the end of 2020, we have heard it all before.

The antidote is to stop saying and start doing, and let the performance speak for itself. 

 

Sell the frog.

 Successful stories are always greater than the sum of their parts.

Great stories engage, enlighten, inform, and inspire, so to dissect the sum to explain the parts may seem easier than selling the whole thing, but it usually does not work. Telling the big picture, the big idea, the big picture, is a key to selling.

Try describing how a frog jumps to someone who has not seen one jump by dissecting it. You can describe the long legs, musculature, power to weight ratio, but that does not help much, better to show them the frog jumping.

Product Disasters can be marketing gold.

Remember the Arnott’s case, in 1997 they recalled millions of packets, and showed them being crushed on TV, in the days before u-tube. Tylenol in the US went trough the same thing in 1882, 6 packets were laced with cyanide, leading to several deaths, and J&J without hesitation recalled the hundreds of millions of packets in the  market, and talked about what had happened, what measures they and the police were taking, and assisted the families of those who had died. 

In the new techie world, the same thing applies, 37 Signals has a suite of software products on the cloud, they appear to work well, but when they go down, (every senior managers major concern with the cloud) as it is out of immediate control, it really hurts. 37 signals lost Campfire, but they turned the disaster into gold by communicating.

In most cases where a recall is deemed necessary, it is just a cost, often a huge one, sometimes a terminal one. However, by taking the public into their confidence, a recall, or outage as in the case of Campfire,  can be used as powerful evidence that the company puts the welfare of their customers above all else.

Pretty powerful stuff in an environment of bland, commodity brands that have little to differentiate themselves.

Mobile Visual Search, MVS for short

Just a few months ago, QR codes seemed to me to be the answer to a marketers prayer, a simple way for products and services to connect with anyone with a mobile device, and an interest. 

However, Aussies,  often quick adapters of technology seemed not to be interested. At a recent wine symposium of a major wine region to which I was lucky enough to score an invitation to, I saw only one brand using QR codes, and yesterday in a major retail outlet, I scoured to the place to find, none.  (great excuse eh, just looking for a QR code darling!). This lack of take-up by Australian wineries was a surprise to me, then Joan Muschamp posted on the Social media examiner site, and all became clear. 

 I thought wineries would rush to QR codes, perhaps the explanation in this article talking about the next big thing, leading to the early death of QR codes, Mobile Visual Search, that we humans are visual animals, and a big bar code does not do it for us, has something in it.

Soon we will be able to point our phone at a building, label, poster, product, whatever, and get immediate feedback on the object. Currently the technology is pretty early stage, Google have started marketing it as “Google Goggles” and Apple has their version as well.

Point is, the pace of innovation  is still accelerating, and the opportunities are for the early adopters, the marketers who get on top of a consumer friendly technology early, and leverage it for the brand, by connecting to their content, and telling their stories.