The Marketing Plaza

A common tab on a web site is “contact us,” but is it really an invitation to contact?  More times than not, the button is used to collect information about you and doesn’t help you, as the consumer, one iota in contacting the company or service. It’s a perfect example of how most companies still hide before an Internet shield and are not personal, or consumer friendly. Instead, their thinly masked veils of friendliness smack of their real intention of building a e-mail database.

If I am frustrated enough to hit the “constact us” button, the truth is I want to contact you, not be contacted by you.  I want to know when I can call to reach a real person and get a real answer.

Recently, I was on the Continental Airlines web site.  Their contact us service is truly frustrating.  During recent snow storms, their listed phone numbers didn’t work. Their comic book customer service person just kept giving me the same wrong answer to my typed question, no matter how many times I changed how I phrased my query.

But, Continental should not be singled out.  Almost every company on the web has poor contact us protocol, making it hard for the customer to do just that – contact them.  Here’s a tip:  Don’t label the web site tab “contact us” if you aren’t posting the information about how to contact you.  Just giving me a form to give you info about me is not helpful.  I don’t want to give you info about me.  I need your phone number, hours of operation and customer service e-mail.  It’s that simple.

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The name of today’s marketing warfare game is Search and Be Found. It’s counter-intuitive to those of us brought up on the old game Battleship, where the goal was not to be found while you uncovered and destroyed your opponent’s ship. The game was based on the Cold War mentality that subterfuge keeps you alive; being open about where you are will get you sunk.

Fast forward to today’s world. Marketing Warfare is very different from Battlefield War Tactics.  Your primary guru should  no longer  be Sun Tzu, author of  The Art of War,  but perhaps Chris Anderson, Seth Godin, or even wine merchant Gary Vaynerchuk.  Google them.  Then, Google something about your company.  Can you be easily found?

In the military, camouflage is still an important and vital tactic.  In marketing, tactics have changed. It’s not about boldly going where no one has before — although that’s not bad.  It’s about bolding letting everyone know where you are from being found to being found frequently and being found whenever the consumer chooses to seek you out — not just during the hours you happen to be open. The web world no longer supplements, but leads all other marketing efforts. Find the new warfare gurus and learn from them … fast.

So why are so many companies so far behind in the web arena? Ironically, the more entrenched a company is either with a strong IT department, politically timid (meaning has a board of directors), or is from an industry that is trained to be close-lipped (read legal and health), the more likely it is behind the times in web marketing.

Here’s a case in point: This week an associate wrote me to to ask why a local newspaper never showed up on Google alerts about a famous and well-known local politician. Certainly the newspaper had more news items online about the politician than any other site except perhaps the politician’s own web site. The answer likely lies in many places – keywords, page branding, site mapping – but one place, for sure, is the IT (Information Technology) department.

Assumption: Many companies, newspapers included, still believe that everthing computer-related belongs with the IT department — web sites among them. Wrong.

Truth: Web sites belong with the marketing department.  Why?  For one reason — only marketing people care about Search and SEO.  And here’s the real conundrum – SEO is largely a programming function, but a function that even though technical should report to marketing.  It is not an operational concern, but a marketing issue. The website can run without it, and run well from an operational standpoint.  It’s just that no one will ever find it — failure from a marketing perspective.

IT people are trained to keep people out — from hackers to hucksters.  Marketing people and the web are geared to let people in.  If you want a web site that gets you listed, lets you get found, and is invites participation, think long and hard about who controls your website.  If it’s your IT department, you have a problem.

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In today’s growing social media world, the key is not so much about creating, but maintaining your presence on your social venue of choice.  This past week, I attended a webinar by Nathan Kievman on maximizing LinkedIn profiles. Yes, even something as simple as LinkedIn requires care, attention and constant updating.  In fact, Nathan has written an entire book on it and  recommends tweaking your LinkedIn profile daily.  There’s no such thing today as a simple Rolodex be it online or in a card deck.

Nathan’s advice is well-taken, but before you spend too much time updating LinkedIn daily — consider if you’re first updating your web site or blog on some frequency — preferably daily.  After all, your web site is your company’s face to the world.

A mother’s lesson: Updating a web site daily is akin to a woman putting on her daily makeup. It’s not a luxury. There are few women who will venture out into the world daily without — as my mother’s generation would have put it — “putting their face on.”  It meant putting on at least the minimal amount of makeup on to put your best face, if not foot, forward to the world.  Every day, your web site faces your prospects and customers, and if it never changes, it quickly looks old or dated and won’t do well in today’s customer speed dating scene.

Reality Check: I can’t imagine many business owners or executives who have the time to update a web site or even their LinkedIn profile daily.  However, not having the time and not recognizing the need are two entirely different things.  If your web site is not being updated daily — including checking the customer guest book and responding to it — then you are not configured for success. This is one clue that you need help either in the form of an employee or service.

Takeaway: The first step towards success is recognizing a need or problem and then solving it.  Recognize that a stagnant web site is a stale and old-fashioned web site and is not presenting you or your company as a modern player.

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The word that is.  Recently I went on a printer's web site that claimed innovative service.  Well said, but was it believable?  Not if you looked at the rest of the web site surrounding the words. 

• The copy had been written for a long shelf life and had not been updated in a few years or months. 
• The pictures were pale (innovation would imply vibrancy to me), and the photos showed presses. Perhaps they were innovative presses, but from the customer's perspective, who can say?
• There were no innovative aps — pages flipping, audio files, video.
• There was no interactivity — not even one form to fill out, or "contact us" button — and those aren't really very interactive.

In short, the web site was nothing more than words on the screen, reflecting the printers penchant for putting words on paper, but little else.

So here's the question:  Who are you marketing to anyway?

If it's a potential customer (as one would hope), the word "innovative" has to reflect what it means in customers' minds and has to have some teeth behind it. Before you claim to be innovative, it would be nice to know exactly how the customer defines it, but you don't have any more time to wait. Start getting info from customers, but meanwhile — tomorrow — start updating your web site.  It's hard to claim "innovative" anything if you don't even have an innovative "skin", or web site.  It's a basic just like having a modern building with running water.  And, it doesn't have to cost you a small fortune.  Just like flat screen TVs, iPhones and all other technically wizardry, web programming and design has also become more affordable. Go get you some — technical wizardry that is.

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Today I saw a banner ad on a web site that was borderline profound.  It said " Be Found Before They Start to Search," or something close to that. The message was simple.  The challenge is not about being found. It's about having customers who never look for anyone else but you.

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If you think Land of the Free refers to the U.S.A., you are showing your age.  Land of the Free is the Internet.  In the January 31 edition of the WSJ's Weekend Journal, author Chris Anderson wrote a thoughtful piece on "The Economics of Giving it Away."   If I can, I'll post the article on the news section of the group.  I posted a NY Times article there earlier in the month, and if you come across a great news story or other material from your neck of the woods, please try to post it on the news section of the our Linked In group so we can continue to gain from our collective experience. Unfortunately, the news posts get buried quickly so you have to dig a bit to get to older uploads.

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LinkedIn is more than a networking tool. It drives traffic to blogs and websites. None are mutually exclusive. Use them all to improve traffic and web visibility.

On July 25, 2008, I started a LinkedIn Group for a trade association. It’s been steadily growing ever since. In touching base with other groups and other LinkedIn Group Managers, the key problem facing most groups is “Now What?” Just being affiliated doesn’t do much. The key, it appear, as with everything else is to communicate.

I made the commitment in a welcome letter to early subscribers that I’d send out an e-newsletter at least once a month. I drafted it this week, but it didn’t seem quite right. For one thing, it immediately became too long. One group member wrote me back saying, ” I think that a monthly email would be just fine, and if you feel that there is much more to share than just once a month, I don’t think too many of us would mind.” So, I’m taking him up on the offer, and have decided to also change format.

I’m going to try writing shorter pieces dedicated to one topic at a time, and instead of e-mailing them, posting them to a blog. Why a blog? For one thing, it helps with SEO and traffic back to the association’s main website. In addition, it can be used to supplement and start discussions on LinkedIn’s discussion group function. dA blog also lends itself to short topics, but lets you write more than you can on a discussion forum.

Increasingly LinkedIn is becoming more important in business communications, but not to the detriment of blogs. The social media and networking world is increasingly intertwined.  Discussion Group forums and blogs are just two of the strings in the growing web.
rbronson@napl.org

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