This week on The Blogger’s Bulletin, I wrote a piece on why the Starbucks Five Ways of Being are appropriate advice for bloggers. Here, I’m continuing the analogy with how we can take tips from our local baristas and learn how to improve our brochures and marketing material.  There’s more than coffee that you can take away from a Starbucks encounter.

In The Starbucks Experience (2007), author Joseph Michelli reviews what has made Starbucks not just a new product or service, but part of our current cultural experience. Starbucks has had some trips since then, but likely its strong corporate credos have allowed it to be flexible in better responding to market changes. At Starbucks, they are called the “Five Ways of Being.”

• Be welcoming
• Be genuine
• Be considerate
• Be knowledgeable
• Be involved

It’s a great map for great marketing, particularly a brochure.  Here’s how:

• Welcoming – I recently saw a brochure where the first page was solid type.  It wasn’t a letter or designed as part of the brochure.  It was intimidating to read, heavy on the eyes and not welcoming to the brochure. It made you want to close the piece rather than dig deeper — kind of like a huge Victorian novel with tiny type.  You likely won’t approach it unless it’s assigned reading. Make sure your opening brochure material is just that – open with welcoming content enticing your reader to enter and linger awhile.
• Genuine – Don’t use flamboyant language, make promises you can’t keep, or statements that don’t ring true. Advertising and marketing materials already have a bad rap for puffery.  Not everyone is the best, brightest, cheapest, highest quality.  The trick to real marketing is being real and finding your true unique selling proposition. If you don’t know it, don’t spend money on puff pieces.  The reader can see right through it.
• Considerate – Be conscious of your customers concerns and address those rather than your ego.  No one likes meeting people at parties who just talk about themselves and yet we think marketing is a business resume letting the reader in on all the wonderful things they need to know about us.  It’s not.  Marketing is your introduction. Tell the customer a little about yourself and a lot about themselves.  If they self-identify, they’ll know you’re the right match for them.
• Knowledgeable – Give some information away for free. You’ve already paid to send people the brochure, so give them some value. Read Chris Anderson’s Free, or link to my post about him and think about what you can already provide for free to give prospects a taste of what you have to offer.  Consider Anderson’s Jello example, where free recipes entices people to want to buy Jello as an ingredient.
• Involved – Show how you are up-to-date and involved with your area of expertise.  Is it a passion?  Why would we know?  Bring us into your story and show us how you evolved and are involved.  People like to work with people they feel they want to know.  Get involved with your customers and give them a behind the scenes look into who and what you are.

There they are – the five ways of being and how you can use them in your next brochure. So before you start your next marketing endeavor, slow down, get a cup of coffee and ponder how you want your brochure to come into being.

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On the surface, social media appears free. You can get a Twitter site or Facebook page for free. You can even set up a blog for free. But, consider this:

• Some blog services are free but limited. Free blog services don’t allow you to monitor stats to see how many visitors you may be attracting, or enter key words to maximize search.
• Facebook is free, but ads are not. If you are using Facebook for business, you should have a business page, be building a fan base, and considering targeted ads. I read somewhere that Starbucks, a leader in the use of a Facebook business page, has six people on its social media staff.  As of July 09, they were reported to have 3.5 million registered Facebook fans.  They may be closing stores, but they aren’t closing down Facebook pages anytime soon.
• Twitter is free, but your time isn’t. You have to post, research posts, and monitor inbox requests. Social media guru Guy Kawasaki has a team of 2-3 twitter ghost writers.  Ever wonder why?

Speaking of Twitter, according to WACO (the World Advertising Research Center, not the city in Texas), earlier this year Dell computer reported that it generated $3 million in sales through microblogging services, and that’s after it had to recover from previously  bad press in the blogosphere!  That kind of revenue potential deserves some investment, wouldn’t you say?

A Marketing Truth: Media costs. We always knew it costs money to take out a TV ad. Why do we suddenly think other marketing channels are free?  There are hard costs and soft costs, but getting your message in front of the right people is a science that takes talent, effort, staff time, creativity, and execution according to plan.  That science, by the way, is  called Marketing.

Another Truth: Planning Saves Time and Money. There are ever-increasing low cost (ahem free) channels for getting your message out to the right people, but the cacophony of choices means you need to wisely invest your time and resources on those outlets that maximize your positioning.  Guess what?  That’s what an executed Marketing Plan is!

Bottom line: Make sure you have the resources at your disposal to make the right choices, keep your messaging consistent in your chosen medium, and measure response.  It takes time, effort and potentially staff resources unless you really want to do it all.  But your time is valuable isn’t it?  I assume you’re “not free.”

P.S. I’m currently working my way through Anderson’s Free. It’s a must read for all business and marketing types. Lot’s of good food for thought.  In keeping with the spirit of the book, I took it out for free from the library.

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1. Most blogs fail.  It’s that simple. The writers lose interest, commitment, don’t think anyone is reading them, don’t market the blogs, don’t engage readers…. this list is endless.

2. Blogs are not websites.  They need to have a person, or defined persons, updating them regularly with a unique voice. A website represents a company. A blog represents a person.  That’s why a company gets a website and a CEO may have blog.

3. Blogs require talent. Writing talent to be specific.  To be read, the blog first needs to be written and, again, in a personal voice. So, if you are going to delegate the blog to a talented employee, know he or she has to also have the authority to write in his or her voice, not yours. Blogs should not be ghost written.

In my speech, I gave other reasons blogging may not be for you.  I’ll save that for a future post. Meanwhile, it should come as no surprise that a huge percentage of blogs are abandoned or fail. In The New York Times, an article on blogging noted that 2008 research showed only 7.4 million out of 133 million blogs had been updated in the last 120 days of the study as tracked by Technorati.

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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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